Over the past few months I’ve spent some time on-and-off working on
Sigul and some related tools. In particular, I
implemented most of a new Sigul
client,
primarily to enable the sigul-pesign-bridge to run on recent Fedora releases
(since the sigul client relies on python-nss, which is not in Fedora anymore).
At this point, I have a reasonably good understanding of how Sigul works.
Originally, my plan was to completely re-implement the client, then the bridge,
and finally the server using the existing Sigul protocol, version 1.2, as
defined by the Python implementation. However, as I got more familiar with the
implementation, I felt that it would be better to use this opportunity to also
change the protocol. In this post I’m going to cover the issues I have with
the current protocol and how I’d like to address them.
In protocol version 1.2, the client and server start “outer” TLS sessions with
the bridge, and then the client starts a nested “inner” TLS session with the
server. Data is sent in chunks which indicate how big the chunk is and whether
it’s part of the “outer” session (and destined for the bridge) or the “inner”
session. While it’s perfectly doable to parse the two streams out, it’s a
complication. Maybe we can introduce some rules to make it easier?
After looking at the implementation, every command follows the same pattern. The client would:
Open a connection to the bridge and send the bridge the command to pass on to the server.
Open the inner TLS session and send some secrets to the server (a key to use
for HMAC and a key passphrase to unlock a signing key, typically).
Close the inner TLS session.
Send HMAC-signed messages to the bridge, which it relays to the server.
Receive HMAC-signed messages from the server, via the bridge.
Critically, the inner TLS session was only used to exchange secrets so the
bridge couldn’t see them, and was never used again. One option would be to only
allow the inner TLS session once, right at the beginning of the connection.
However, the whole point of the HMAC-signed messages is that the client and
server don’t seem to really “trust” the bridge won’t have tampered with the
messages. Why not just use the inner TLS session exclusively so that we get
confidentiality in addition to integrity?
Homegrown serialization
When Sigul was originally written things like JSON weren’t part of the Python
standard library. It implemented its own, limited format. Now, however, there
are a number of widely supported serialization options. JSON is the obvious
choice as it is fairly human-readable, ubiquitous, and fairly simple. The
downside is that for signing requests, the client needs to send some binary
data. However, we explicitly do not want to be sending huge files to be signed,
so base64-encoding small pieces of binary data should be acceptable.
The bridge is too smart
The bridge includes features that are not used, and that complicate the
implementation.
Fedora Account System integration
The bridge supports configuring a set of required Fedora Account System groups
the user needs to be in to make requests. It checks the user against the
account system when it connects by using the Common Name in the client
certificate as the username.
However, this feature is not used by
Fedora,
and since Fedora is probably the only deployment of this service, we probably
don’t need this feature.
The bridge alters commands
For most commands, the bridge shovels bits between the client connection and
the server connection. However, before it shovels, it parses out the requests
and responses before forwarding them. There’s really only one good reason for
this. Two particular commands may alter the client request before sending it
to the server. Those two commands are “sign-rpm” and “sign-rpms”.
In the event that the client requests a signature for an RPM or multiple RPMs
and the request doesn’t include a payload, the bridge will download the RPM
from Koji. Now, the bridge doesn’t have the HMAC keys used in other commands to
sign the request, so the client also contacts Koji and includes the RPM’s
checksum in the request headers.
This particular design choice might have been done to save a hop when
transferring large RPMs, but these days you don’t need to send the whole RPM,
just the header to be signed.
It’s confusing to have the bridge take an active role in client requests.
What’s more, if we push this responsibility to the client, there’s no reason
the bridge needs to see the requests and responses at all.
Usernames
As noted in the Fedora Account System integration section, the bridge uses the
client certificate’s Common Name to determine the username. However, all
requests also include a “user” field.
The server checks to ensure either the request username matches the client
certificate’s Common Name, or if the lenient_username_check configuration
option is set which disables that check, or if the Common Name is in a
configuration option, proxy_usernames, listing that that Common Name can use
whatever username it wants.
The Fedora
configuration
doesn’t define either of those configuration options, and it’s confusing to
have two places to define the username.
Passwords
Users have several types of passwords.
Users are given access to signing keys by setting a user-specific passphrase
for each key. This passphrase is used to encrypt a copy of the “real” key
password, so each user can access the key without ever knowing what the key
password is.
However, each user also has an “account password” which is only needed for
admin commands, and only works if the account is flagged as an admin. Given
that the client certificate can be password-protected it’s not clear to me that
this adds any value, but it is confusing.
Summary
To summarize, the major changes I’m considering in a new version of the Sigul protocol are:
All client-server communication happens over the nested TLS session. The
client and server no longer need to manually HMAC-sign requests and responses
as a result.
The bridge is a simple proxy that authenticates the client and server
connections via mutual TLS and then shovels bits between the two connections
without any knowledge of the content. Drop the Fedora Account System
integration, and push the responsibility of communicating with Koji to the
client.
Switch from the homegrown serialization format to JSON for requests and responses.
Rely exclusively on the client certificate’s Common Name for the username.
Remove the admin password from user accounts as they can password-protect
their client key and also use features like systemd-creds to encrypt the key
with the host’s TPM.
As syslog-ng 4.9.0 is not yet released, you need to run a development snapshot of syslog-ng to test this feature. You can compile syslog-ng from source, but luckily there are many other options available as well, especially if you want to run syslog-ng on Linux or FreeBSD. I collected these in a recent blog at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/a-call-for-testing-the-upcoming-syslog-ng-releases. You also need Prometheus. I used the version available in openSUSE Leap as a package in the distribution.
Configuring syslog-ng
Append the following configuration snippet to your syslog-ng.conf or create a new .conf file under the /etc/syslog-ng/conf.d/ directory, if your syslog-ng deployment is configured to use it.
After reloading Prometheus and syslog-ng, I could see syslog-ng statistics on the Prometheus web interface and even create some basic graphs for its values.
What is next?
Please share your experiences with us! Reporting issues helps development, especially before a release. However, we are also very happy to hear positive feedback and learning that one of our long-requested features is actually used :-) You can do both at https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng/
-
If you have questions or comments related to syslog-ng, do not hesitate to contact us. You can reach us by email or even chat with us. For a list of possibilities, check our GitHub page under the “Community” section at https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng. On Twitter, I am available as @PCzanik, on Mastodon as @Pczanik@fosstodon.org.
Now, with my Altra-based system, I decided to try it again.
Hardware used
Compared to the Pinkiepie (the Mustang), Wooster (the current system) looks beefy:
component
Pinkiepie
Wooster
cpu model
X-Gene 1
Altra Q80-30
core model
X-Gene 1
Neoverse-N1
core arch
v8.0
v8.2
core count
8
80
memory speed
1866 MHz
3200 MHz
memory amount
16 GB
128 GB
storage
SATASSD (500 MB/s)
PCIe 4.0 NVME (6200 MB/s)
graphics card
Radeon HD5450
Radeon RX6700XT
resolution
1920x1080
3440x1440
Both systems ran the latest, stable release of Fedora with the KDE desktop.
Generic use
I started by rsyncing my home directory from Puchatek (my x86-64 desktop) to
Wooster (the AArch64 system). To have the same environment in both places. Of
course, I had to replace a few binaries in the ~/.local/bin directory with their
AArch64 equivalents. And I regenerated some Python virtual environments.
The desktop worked as before, Thunderbird fetched mail and sent it, files could
be edited in Neovim-qt as before etc.
Films from the local NAS share worked just fine using the same “mpv” as on Puchatek.
Multimedia online
But then you realise that it would be nice to listen to some music. For several
reasons, I am using Spotify for this. And their app is x86-64 only…
Firefox refused to play anything. So did Chromium. I Installed the
“widevine-installer” package, ran one command and, thanks to binaries from
ChromeOS, both web browsers started playing. But Firefox was stopping after each
song, so I had to revert to Chromium for it. Widgets on the KDE Plasma desktop
recognised it, and I had information and playback controls embedded in the top panel.
Films on streaming services
But what about films on streaming services? Well, let me create a table, as I was
surprised by the results:
Streaming service
Firefox
Chromium
Amazon Prime Video
Works
Works
Disney Plus
Works
Works
Max
Works
Works
Netflix
Fails (E100)
Fails (E100)
YouTube
Works, up to 4320p
Works, up to 1440p*
Chromium
For Chromium it depends which build of it you are using. I used Fedora
package and then was pointed to Flathub build of
Chromium as better one.
Flathub’s Chromium plays 2160p videos on YouTube and does not have an option to
choose higher resolutions so I could not test 4320p ones.
Again, let make a table of “Graphics Feature Status” information:
Entry
Fedora build
Flathub build
Canvas
Software only
Hardware accelerated
Direct Rendering Display Compositor
Disabled
Disabled
Compositing
Software only
Hardware accelerated
Multiple Raster Threads
Enabled
Enabled
OpenGL
Disabled
Enabled
Rasterization
Software only
Hardware accelerated
Raw Draw
Disabled
Disabled
Skia Graphite
Disabled
Disabled
TreesInViz
Disabled
Disabled
Video Decode
Software only
Hardware accelerated
Video Encode
Software only
Software only
Vulkan
Disabled
Disabled
WebGL
Software only
Hardware accelerated
WebGL2
Software only
Hardware accelerated
WebGPU
Disabled
Disabled
WebNN
Software only
Disabled
WebGL
How does the 3D hardware acceleration situation look? I tested it with
the WebGL Aquarium.
Amount of fish
Firefox
Chromium/Fedora
Chromium/Flathub
1
75
18
75
1000
75
9
75
5000
42-71
4
29-37
10000
33-39
1
15-17
I do not remember numbers I got with the same graphics card in my x86-64 system.
To be continued…
I am planning to write a few more posts about using my Ampere Altra-based system
as a desktop. So stay tuned.
Hey everyone. Welcome to the far side of the 2025 Datacenter Move.
Everything is now moved over and (mostly) working from the new location.
There are of course some things to fix still. We have been tracking
the smaller items in: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/issue/12620
and larger ones in their own tickets. At this point if you see an issue
please check if it's been mentioned above or in another infra ticket
and if not, let us know.
Things did not go as smoothly as I was hoping they would.
I was hoping to have the build pipeline up and running on wed, but
it took us until thursday morning to finish bringing it up.
We are collecting items for a retrospective now and should hold
that in the next week or two, but a few I will be mentioning:
The good:
Other folks on my team (CLE - Community Linux Engineering) did tons
of great work. My co-workers in .eu timezones shutting things down,
then storage folks in east coast us switching storage meant that
when I got in (west coast us) everything was ready to move.
The other Red Hat teams we worked with ( networking, storage, dc
operations) were all great and very responsive to helping us
The community was great in being patient and waiting for things
to come back up.
The new machines are super fast!
The bad:
Took longer than expected to bring the build pipeline up again.
This was due to a number of reasons, but the two big ones were:
a) We used mtu 9000 in the old datacenter and carried that over to
the new one. However there were some cross vlan links that were not
working right with jumbo frames. This culminated in a networking
outage wed afternoon that took us off line for a few hours. and
b) our pkgs server is not something we redeploy much. It's one of
our last RHEL8 instances. Because of this there were some issues
that were difficult to debug and work through to get things working.
I copied our wiki database several times and it failed with a disk
space full error. Turns out mariadb has a large binary file and
by default rsync just copies to a temp copy and moves it in place
at the end. If your disk isn't more than 2x the size of the db,
boom. --inplace fixed that.
Next week there's still some work to do. We need to power off
all the machines in our old datacenter. Some of the newer hardware
will be shipped to the new datacenter and we will use them to
augment capacity. Some will be more builders, more openqa workers,
etc.
Finally, I've been super focused on this move, now that we are done
after next week I hope to start in on the backlog of other things
that I put off: packaging work, emails to reply to, AI scraper
mitigation, and such.
This is a weekly report from the I&R (Infrastructure & Release Engineering) Team. We provide you both infographic and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.
Week: 30 June – 04 July 2025
Infrastructure & Release Engineering
The purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work. It’s responsible for services running in Fedora and CentOS infrastructure and preparing things for the new Fedora release (mirrors, mass branching, new namespaces etc.). List of planned/in-progress issues
Fedora Data Center Move: “It’s Move Time!” and Successful Progress!
This week was “move time” for the Fedora Data Center migration from IAD2 to RDU3, and thanks to the collective effort of the entire team, it’s been a significant success! We officially closed off the IAD2 datacenter, with core applications, databases, and the build pipeline successfully migrated to RDU3. This involved meticulously scaling down IAD2 OpenShift apps, migrating critical databases, and updating DNS, followed by the deployment and activation of numerous OpenShift applications in RDU3. While challenges arose, especially with networking and various service configurations, our dedicated team worked tirelessly to address them, ensuring most services are now operational in the new environment. We’ll continue validating and refining everything, but we’re thrilled with the progress made in establishing Fedora’s new home!
If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on matrix.
Version 8.5.0alpha1 has been released. It's still in development and will enter soon in the stabilization phase for the developers, and the test phase for the users (see the schedule).
RPM of this upcoming version of PHP 8.5, are available in remi repository for Fedora ≥ 41 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, CentOS, Alma, Rocky...) in a fresh new Software Collection (php85) allowing its installation beside the system version.
As I (still) strongly believe in SCL's potential to provide a simple way to allow installation of various versions simultaneously, and as I think it is useful to offer this feature to allow developers to test their applications, to allow sysadmin to prepare a migration or simply to use this version for some specific application, I decide to create this new SCL.
I also plan to propose this new version as a Fedora 44 change (as F43 should be released a few weeks before PHP 8.5.0).
Installation :
yum install php85
⚠️ To be noticed:
the SCL is independent from the system and doesn't alter it
this SCL is available in remi-safe repository (or remi for Fedora)
installation is under the /opt/remi/php85 tree, configuration under the /etc/opt/remi/php85 tree
the FPM service (php85-php-fpm) is available, listening on /var/opt/remi/php85/run/php-fpm/www.sock
the php85 command gives simple access to this new version, however, the module or scl command is still the recommended way.
for now, the collection provides 8.5.0-alpha1, and alpha/beta/RC versions will be released in the next weeks
some of the PECL extensions are already available, see the extensions status page
tracking issue#307 can be used to follow the work in progress on RPMS of PHP and extensions
the php85-syspaths package allows to use it as the system's default version
ℹ️ Also, read other entries about SCL especially the description of My PHP workstation.
$ module load php85
$ php --version
PHP 8.5.0alpha1 (cli) (built: Jul 1 2025 21:58:05) (NTS gcc x86_64)
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Built by Remi's RPM repository #StandWithUkraine
Zend Engine v4.5.0-dev, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
with Zend OPcache v8.5.0alpha1, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies
As always, your feedback is welcome on the tracking ticket.
Update Django from 5.1.8 to 5.1.11, addressing medium severity vulnerabilities,
CVE-2025-32873 and
CVE-2025-48432,
which do not appear to affect Kiwi TCMS
Improvements
Remove the django-uuslug dependency
Update django-colorfield from 0.13.0 to 0.14.0
Update django-grappelli from 4.0.1 to 4.0.2
Update django-guardian from 2.4.0 to 3.0.3
Update django-simple-history from 3.8.0 to 3.10.1
Update django-tree-queries from 0.19.0 to 0.20.0
Update markdown from 3.8 to 3.8.2
Update psycopg[binary] from 3.2.6 to 3.2.9
Update pygments from 2.19.1 to 2.19.2
Update python-gitlab from 5.6.0 to 6.1.0
Update uwsgi from 2.0.29 to 2.0.30
Update node_modules/pdfmake from 0.2.18 to 0.2.20
Display nested Test Plan(s) in select drop-down on New Test Run page
Implement Bugzilla.details() method to fetch more information about
reported bugs via the existing Bugzilla integration interface
Refactor URL /accounts/<username>/profile/ into
/accounts/<pk>/profile/
to prevent usernames being exposed in logs or anonymous analytics
Refactor URL /plan/<pk>/<slug> into /plan/<pk>/ to prevent test plan
summary being exposed in logs or anonymous analytics. Fixes
Issue #3994
Bug fixes
Make sure IssueTrackerType.details() method provides id and
status fields to prevent crashes when IssueTracker integration falls back
to this method
For Bug.details() API method always cast internal result to dict
to avoid the situation where modernrpc/handlers/xmlhandler.py::dumps_result()
doesn't know how to serialize that! Fixes
Sentry KIWI-TCMS-VV
Don't send email notifications to inactive users
Refactoring and testing
Update node_modules/eslint-plugin-import from 2.31.0 to 2.32.0
Update node_modules/webpack from 5.99.6 to 5.99.9
Use the public interface tcms_api.TCMS().exec in tests
Add test for unauthenticated Bugzilla.details() which falls back to
OpenGraph
Dans le cadre des 20 ans de Fedora-fr (et du Projet Fedora en lui-même), Charles-Antoine Couret (Renault) et Nicolas Berrehouc (Nicosss) avons souhaité poser des questions à des contributeurs francophones du Projet Fedora et de Fedora-fr.
Grâce à la diversité des profils, cela permet de voir le fonctionnement du Projet Fedora sous différents angles pour voir le projet au delà de la distribution mais aussi comment il est organisé et conçu. Notons que sur certains points, certaines remarques restent d'application pour d'autres distributions.
N'oublions pas que le Projet Fedora reste un projet mondial et un travail d'équipe ce que ces entretiens ne permettent pas forcément de refléter. Mais la communauté francophone a de la chance d'avoir suffisamment de contributeurs de qualité pour permettre d'avoir un aperçu de beaucoup de sous projets de la distribution.
L'entretien du jour concerne Kévin Raymond (pseudo shaiton), ancien contributeur de Fedora et de Fedora-fr.org.
Entretien
Bonjour Kévin, peux-tu présenter brièvement ton parcours ?
Perso ? Au sein de la communauté ? C'est un peu trop large pour être bref.. Curieux et créatif, j'ai découvert l'informatique, l'électronique et la programmation au Lycée. J'ai eu la chance que mon père fasse le choix de Linux pour moi et s'occupe de mes premières installations… Voir configuration matérielle. Au début il fallait internet pour configurer internet (recompilation de pilotes de périphériques) c'était un beau casse-tête sans personne pour vous aiguiller. Bon ok si on remet dans l'ordre au tout début il n'y avait pas la problématique du Wi-Fi. J'ai poursuivi mes études par un DUT GEII (Génie Electrique et Informatique Industrielle) en poursuivant sur une licence puis une école d'ingénieur électronique/informatique en alternance. Plus les années passaient plus j'avais de projets informatique ou électronique perso ou professionnels à réaliser et plus je m'éloignais du monde Windows, plus je me sentais chez moi sous Linux.
Peux-tu présenter brièvement tes contributions au Projet Fedora ?
Initialement traducteur francophone, j'en suis arrivé à être le coordinateur principal de l'équipe francophone. J'ai également contribué à l'internationalisation des sites internet du Projet Fedora. Ce qui m'a amené à en être un des mainteneurs principaux pendant quelques temps et de m'occuper du déploiement des nouvelles versions à chaque nouvelle sortie de version de Fedora. De là j'ai intégré l'équipe infrastructure afin de pouvoir suivre ou déclencher les mises à jour des sites. Étant un des traducteurs principaux, j'ai rejoins l'équipe documentation pour la même raison que l'équipe site internet : améliorer le déploiement des traductions. Et c'est également pour les traductions que je suis devenu coordinateur Transifex, une des plateformes de traduction utilisée un temps par le projet. Il a fallu accompagner les développeurs pour la migration et assurer le suivi du déploiement. Le problème principal étant qu'un développeur ne se rend pas compte qu'une traduction est disponible ou même qu'elle n'est pas inclue dans sa dernière version. Ayant un pied dans pas mal de portes, j'en suis venu à aider la coordination de chaque sortie de versions de Fedora. Ça c'est pour la partie productivité, mais il y a la partie sociabilité qui est une part importante de la vie d'un contributeur. Je suis devenu ambassadeur du Projet Fedora jusqu'à en devenir un mentor. J'ai également intégré le bureau de l'association Fedora-Fr, devenue Borsalinux-Fr lors de mon mandat. J'ai dirigé quelque temps la production de goodies pour l'équipe FR, les réunions hebdomadaire et co-organisé une rencontre internationale à Paris − le FUDCON − après en avoir été plusieurs fois un participant actif (aux États-Unis, Italie, Suisse).
Qu'est-ce qui fait que tu es venu sur Fedora et que tu y es resté ?
Pour le produit, c'était « Fedora Core » à l'époque : pour la nouveauté. Les distributions GNU/Linux étaient en plein développement, beaucoup de nouveautés arrivaient chez l'un avant l'autre. J'en ai essayé plusieurs et j'ai beaucoup aimé les choix proposés sous Fedora Core, j'y suis resté depuis 2005 (au moins en perso, si l'entreprise ne me laissait pas le choix).
Pourquoi contribuer à Fedora en particulier ?
Quant-au Projet et bien c'est parce que le produit me plaisait que tout naturellement c'est là que j'ai participé. Autant contribuer à ce dont on se sert tous les jours. Bon je dois quand même dire que c'est le programme d'ambassadeur qui m'a permis d'être inclus. Les forum d'entraide je voyais plutôt ça comme un mal nécessaire. En arrivant sur Paris, j'ai eu la chance de pouvoir rencontrer physiquement des passionnés prêt à vous écouter et vous aiguiller sur vos aspirations. Merci à Mathieu Bridon (dit « bochecha ») sans qui je serai resté de l'autre côté de la fenêtre.
Contribues-tu à d'autres Logiciels Libres ? Si oui, lesquels et comment ?
Très et trop peu. Je maintiens la traduction du logiciel GNU Make. D'ailleurs il me faut la rafraichir depuis la dernière mise à jour. J'en suis devenu le mainteneur parce que le précédent ne répondait plus et que la traduction actuelle ne me convenait pas. Si quelqu'un veut le reprendre je m'en sépare bien volontiers ! Ensuite j'ai des contributions ponctuelles sur mes interactions professionnelles. Principalement pour du correctif je n'ai pas une part active malgré mon envie. J'essaye autant que possible de tester les nouvelles versions de Fedora dès la version Alpha. Grâce à ma connaissance de Fedora, j'ai intégré le projet OLPC France où j'ai pu apporter mon expertise « Fedora » pour les outils de sauvegarde et mise à jour des XO (nom des ordinateurs portable du Projet OLPC basés sur la distribution GNU/Linux Fedora). Et je suis même allé à Madagascar gérer le déploiement d'une mise à jour distro de l'ensemble d'un parc. Expérience très enrichissante.
Utilises-tu Fedora dans un contexte professionnel ? Et pourquoi ?
Oui autant que possible. C'est mon univers, je maîtrise l'environnement et je n'ai pas besoin de chercher comment faire telle ou telle actions ce qui est bien plus rapide. J'apprécie aussi énormément les choix proposés par défaut. GNOME et son mode non intrusif me permet de rester concentré sur le principal (en espérant que la proposition du choix par défaut KDE ne sera pas acceptée…) Mais c'est aussi parce que Fedora fait partie de moi, je me suis construit avec le produit, avec le projet et avec la communauté. C'est comme quitter son pays natal, on peut le faire mais on n'est plus chez nous. Je me sens très bien sous Fedora et si je veux aider, corriger ou contribuer, je sais déjà comment m'y remettre.
Est-ce que tes contributions à Fedora sont un atout direct ou indirect dans ta vie professionnelle ? Si oui, de quelle façon ?
C'est un atout direct bien évidemment. Étant ingénieur en systèmes embarqués Linux, autant maîtriser l'environnement qui permet de répondre au besoin de l'entreprise. Dans l'entreprise on doit répondre à un besoin. Et pour ça l'humain invente des outils. S'il ne maîtrise pas ses outils il est moins productif et perd une part de ses capacités pour s'adapter à son environnement. D'un autre côté, j'aime le produit Fedora (peut-être maintenant surtout pour la Communauté) et travailler sous Fedora c'est vouloir se lever le matin et être accueilli par quelque chose qui nous fait plaisir. C'est devenu important pour mon bien être.
Tu as été actif sur de nombreux projets de Fedora durant quelques années tout en étant non employé de Red Hat, est-ce que cela a été un frein dans ta participation d'une quelconque façon ?
Absolument pas. J'étais assez pris par toutes mes contributions pour ne pas chercher à vouloir faire de la politique. Il y avait déjà assez de Guru dans l'équipe française pour que je ne m'y colle pas. Au travers de Red Hat j'ai trouvé du soutien, des conseils et du professionnalisme. Mais également des amis.
Qu'est-ce que tu as fait plus exactement pour l'infrastructure et les sites web du Projet Fedora ?
Pour les sites web, j'ai cherché à faire en sorte que mes traductions soient utilisées, déployées. C'est bien beau de passer ses nuits à traduire plutôt que dormir ou réviser, mais si le jour J la traduction n'est pas utilisée, à quoi cela sert-il ? Et si on te réponds « arf, si ça avait été publié 12h plutôt ça aurait apparu, maintenant il faut attendre le prochain déploiement dans 6 j » ça frustre. Et parfois ce n'est pas qu'une question de date c'est aussi un problème de code. Le développeur ne sait pas qu'une traduction est disponible, il ne l'utilise donc pas. J'ai donc pris en charge la synchronisation des équipes de traduction avec la génération des différents sites. J'ai créé des outils et modifié les process de déploiement des sites afin que les traducteurs soient au courant des dates et que l'équipe websites déploit automatiquement les traductions sans étapes manuelles inutiles. Côté infra j'étais là pour seconder l'équipe sur le déploiement des sites internet. Je pouvais déployer moi-même la version de test du site fedoraproject.org afin que les traducteurs puissent relire leurs traductions et soumettre des problèmes/correctifs avant le déploiement le jour J (pour rappel une nouvelle version tous les 6 mois). En tant que coordinateur principal de l'équipe de traduction francophone, j'étais aux premières loges pour corriger les problèmes et indiquer la procédure de test aux autres équipes.
Tu as aussi géré la traduction quelques années entre Thomas Canniot et Jean-Baptiste Holcroft, qu'est-ce qui t'a attiré dans cette activité et qu'est-ce que tu as fait ?
Ça a été entre mon année d'étude en Écosse ou j'ai beaucoup amélioré mon anglais et ma première année d'école d'ingénieur à Paris. Si j'ose l'annoncer à voie haute, j'ai eu beaucoup de temps perso lors de mes années d'école d'ingénieur c'est grâce à tout ce temps libre que j'ai pu plonger dans le projet Fedora. Et Matthieu, mon mentor m'a correctement accompagné pour trouver là ou je serai le plus utile, l'équipe de traduction où Thomas s'est quasiment retrouvé tout seul. Il gérait une équipe d'1,5 personne en se comptant lui-même. Je suis arrivé et à deux on a abattu un travail énorme pour rattraper les dérives. Je traduisais puis lui me corrigeait. Je venais de loin, il a fallu attendre mes 24 ans que je découvre la grammaire française, les règles d'accord COI/COD… Bon ce n'était pas très fun alors je me suis spécialisé sur la syntaxe. À deux nous avons recruté d'autres traducteurs, ensuite il a vu qu'on était une équipe, il m'a laissé la main sur la traduction. J'ai vécu 2 transitions d'outils de gestion des traductions. J'ai donné beaucoup d'effort sur le projet Transifex. Jusqu'à ce que ce projet se tourne vers un modèle commercial et que le projet Fedora change d'outil. Là je me suis dit que je ne voulais pas recommencer, j'avais des projets de refonte de tout l'outil de déploiement des sites internet. L'équipe de traduction n'était plus mon sujet prioritaire. Je ne sais même plus comment Jean-Baptiste a pris la main, mais à un moment donné les projets ont migré sur le nouvel outil, et moi j'ai perdu tout ce que j'avais mis en place. Mes outils ou scripts permettant d'obtenir les dernières traductions, d'obtenir le pourcentage de complétion de traduction de chaque langue sur chaque projet. Je n'ai plus rouvert cette porte j'ai laissé la main et je me suis concentré uniquement sur la relecture et la formation des nouveaux : habitudes de traduction pour la cohérence de l'historique, utilisation de la bonne syntaxe. Jusqu'à ce qu'on ne me voit plus contribuer sur la liste de diffusion. En résumé, j'avais le développement des sites qui était prioritaire, j'avais de moins en moins de temps à accorder, une équipe de jeunes (pas dans l'âge mais dans la date d'arrivée dans l'équipe de traduction francophone) et un changement d'outil et de process qui m'ont tout naturellement écartés de mes responsabilités.
En 2012, le FUDCon (devenu Flock depuis) s'est tenu à Paris et tu en as été l'un des principaux organisateurs. Peux-tu expliquer le but de ces rencontres et de leur importance ? Quelles ont été les difficultés d'une telle organisation ? Quels souvenirs en retires tu ?
Le FUDCon était un événement annuel (par région) qui était l'occasion pour les contributeurs de se rencontrer pour mieux se connaître mais aussi pour avancer plus rapidement sur des points particuliers et abolir les fuseaux horaires. C'était également l'occasion de rencontrer les « Redhatters ». C'est également lors de ces événements qu'on rapproche tous les organes de la communauté. Les rencontres physiques sont très importantes. Beaucoup d'échanges dans la communauté se passent en anglais, dont c'est la langue maternelle pour une grande partie. Il est parfois difficile de cerner le ton employé à l'écrit par un individu − oui toutes nos réunions étaient en chat/IRC −, c'est lors de rencontre de ce genre qu'on peut cerner le caractère d'un individu et comprendre quand il est sérieux, ironique ou espiègle. C'est aussi l'occasion d'échanger sur la vie, d'autres sujets qui ne sont pas ceux de tous les jours. Ou ouvre notre horizon. Lors de mon premier FUDCon à Zurich, j'étais tout jeune arrivé dans le projet. Je n'avais pas grand chose à dire mais beaucoup à apprendre. Et plus je me rapprochais de l'équipe France, plus j'entendais que la communauté rêverait d'un événement en France, à Paris. Alors un jour, un peu poussé, on a monté une petite équipe pour cet événement. Il a fallu choisir une date, trouver un lieu, proposer des logements et réaliser toute la logistique : - créer des goodies pour faire de petit cadeaux pour que les contributeurs puissent repartir avec un beau souvenir (t-shit « tour Eiffel » et dessous-de verre réutilisables) - gérer les subventions des contributeurs, s'ils proposaient un sujet (talk) ils pouvaient bénéficier d'une subvention par Red Hat - trouver un traiteur - coordonner l'équipe d'orga… J'ai rencontré pas mal de nouvelles difficultés. C'est la première fois que je gérais (en partie) un budget autre que le mien. Mais c'est également la première fois qu'on comptait sur moi -physiquement- à une si grande échelle. L'équipe d'organisation s'est principalement tournée autour des membres de l'association Borsalinux-Fr, mais on avait bien entendu des personnes en charge côté « Red Hat » sur qui se reposer puisque cet événement était sponsorisé tous les ans sur les différentes régions (Amérique, Asie, EMEA). N'oubliez surtout pas que dans EMEA il y a Europe, mais également Afrique. Ahhhh l'Afrique. C'est loin et dans l'espace et dans la culture. Je me souviens d'un appel le matin de l'événement. « Salut Kévin, j'ai raté mon avion, tu peux me trouver un autre vol » ? Oui, c'était un contributeur dont le billet d'avion était payé complètement sur le budget subvention de l'événement. Et ça paraissait naturel pour lui que je lui paie un nouveau billet pour l'avion qu'il avait raté parce qu'il est arrivé en retard à l'aéroport... Bon il a choisit de prendre lui-même le nouveau billet il est venu et on a passé de bons moments ! C'était un des contributeurs les plus actifs de sa région à cette époque. Autre problématique plus ennuyante au long terme : j'ai utilisé mon adresse email perso pour réserver le traiteur. Et je ne sais pas ce qu'il a fait, mais il s'est enregistré avec ma propre adresse email sur une liste quelque part, et depuis 12 ans je reçois des emails en tant que gestionnaire de cette entreprise. J'ai des candidatures spontané pour des comptables, je reçois des promotions pour acheter des sardines en gros, je reçois des nouvelles de la mairie de Paris… Ça c'est pénible. Mais j'avais à l'époque l'alias email @fedoraproject.org et j'aurai du écrire avec mon contact « pro » plutôt que perso. On apprend beaucoup en contribuant dans les projets communautaires ! Finalement, avoir organisé cet événement m'a donné de l'expérience pour organiser le même genre d'événement au sein du projet OLPC − One Laptop Per Child.
Tu as aussi beaucoup rédigé et géré le magazine francophone Muffin, peux-tu nous expliquer en quoi ça consistait et ce que tu as fait ? Que penses-tu de ce format et du travail réalisé ?
Muffin c'était incroyable. Depuis mes années d'études ou je devais rédiger des rapports et présenter du contenu d'une manière très formelle, j'ai appris à rédiger en LaTeX. Je pensais savoir, connaître et comprendre. Quand j'ai vu ce que mettait en place melmorabity (Mohamed El Morabity) pour le rendu, j'étais obligé de rester pour en apprendre plus ! J'ai surtout participé à la rédaction du numéro 3. C'est l'occasion de mettre en avant des nouveautés, d'anticiper sur les demandes qui vont venir dans les forum et de présenter de contenu de qualité à nos utilisateurs. J'étais tous les premiers samedi du mois aux PSL à la Cité des Sciences à Paris. C'était une rencontre mensuelle (peut-être a-t-elle encore lieu ?) où plusieurs contributeurs de plein de communautés différentes venaient à la rencontre de leurs utilisateurs. Ce magazine avait une cible de plus. C'était également quelque chose qu'on était fier de mettre en avant lors des différents salons que nous représentions (FOSDEM, Solution Linux…) Fedora misant sur les nouveautés, il est important qu'on utilise différents moyens pour annoncer les changements aux utilisateurs. C'était un moyen de plus.
Par ailleurs à la même période il y avait je crois un _Linux Pratique Essentiel_ dédié à Fedora 13 sorti vers 2011-2012 qui a impliqué de nombreux rédacteurs de la communauté francophone dont toi. Peux-tu revenir sur cette expérience ? Quelle a été la plus-value de travailler avec un éditeur pour créer ce magazine payant ?
Hum, ça me dit quelque chose mais je n'en n'ai plus aucun souvenir. J'ai peut-être très peu contribué dans ce magazine ? Je me souviens plutôt de ma première rencontre avec mon mentor, au 42 de je ne sais plus quelle rue à Paris. C'était pour un live sur Radio Libertaire pour ensuite aller à une rediffusion d'une conférence de RMS dans un lieu plein d'idées nouvelles… Y'a pas à dire il se passe plein de chose à Paris !
Tu t'es ensuite mis en retrait de la communauté francophone après 2013, pour quelles raisons ?
Plus j'en faisais au sein de la communauté Fedora, plus j'étais en capacité d'en faire plus. Je n'arrêtais pas d'interagir avec les différentes équipes pour améliorer la productivité, réduire les freins rencontrés par différents contributeurs, améliorer la collaboration. Sauf qu'au bout d'un moment, on entend les oiseaux chanter par la fenêtre et on se dit « mince, c'est déjà le matin ? » aller il faut aller chercher une ou deux heures de sommeil avant d'attaquer le boulot. Celui pour lequel on est payé. J'ai passé des semaines à plus de 30h de contribution sur les projets libres. Avec le boulot à plein temps à côté. Je n'étais pas le seul, mais si en plus on se disperse dans trop de sujets on ne peut pas tous les suivre complètement. Et si en plus on est à Madagascar avec une connexion internet limité, que ça coïncide avec le déploiement d'une nouvelle version et que c'est habituellement toi qui appuie sur le bouton ? Et bien tu trouves un « jeune » tout fou que tu formes et qui passe autant de temps avec toi sur internet qu'avec sa famille, tu lui confies la tâche d'appuyer sur le bouton et d'utiliser en prod tout le process de déploiement que tu viens de changer et activer après 2 mois de refontes complète. Tu te rends compte que ça se passe bien sans toi, que ça tourne, qu'il est fiable. Tu es rassuré et tu te dis « je me suis libéré d'une charge, qu'elle est ma prochaine priorité ? » Merci à Robert Mayr (robyduck) pour cette belle succession ! À ce moment j'ai également quitté Paris pour revenir dans mes montagnes (Haute-Savoie). J'ai intégré un nouveau travail dans lequel j'ai mis tout mon temps et même plus. Je n'ai plus eu l'occasion de rencontrer les collaborateurs du Projet Fedora aussi souvent et j'ai décroché. Oui j'ai trop donné pour mon entreprise à l'époque pour ce qu'elle me rendait, mais ayant relâché les rennes de la traduction FR et des sites internet, je me suis redirigé vers le loisir en montagne ce qui m'a permis de passer moins de temps sur l'ordinateur. Je n'avais plus non plus de contacts réguliers avec des guru de l'informatique : ceux qui vous tirent vers le haut. J'avais beaucoup de connaissances sur la collaboration que j'ai acquis au sein du projet à mettre en place dans mon entreprise. Finalement, j'ai continué mes « contributions libres » mais en tant que bénévole, je suis maintenant formateur en alpinisme. Je passe beaucoup de mon temps libre dans une autre association qui n'a plus de lien avec Fedora si ce n'est le bénévolat.
Si tu avais la possibilité de changer quelque chose dans la distribution Fedora ou dans sa manière de fonctionner, qu'est-ce que ce serait ?
Je ne suis plus au fait des axes politiques Fedora/Red Hat, je ne sais pas à quel point le rachat de Red Hat a influé sur le Projet Fedora même si j'ai vu passer quelques messages sur ce contexte. Je trouve que certains aspects sont trop éparpillés. J'ai vécu (à côté sans être contributeur) le développement de la forge Pagure (hello pingou !) mais également le choix de certains projets de partir sur gitlab ou github. Il y a des avantages et des inconvénients. Personnellement, j'ai découvert Gerrit et tout ce que ça permet. Je l'ai moi-même mis en place dans mon nouvel emplois en 2014. Dès cet instant je n'ai plus réussi à contribuer au Projet Fedora. Les outils utilisés étaient un frein pour moi je ne pouvais plus suivre les développements aussi facilement. Donc si je devais changer quelque chose dans le projet, on passerait tout sous Gerrit. Ok je n'ai pas répondu à la vraie question qui concernait le produit... Wayland, systemd ? Non non la politique ce n'est pas pour moi, j'aime avancer et ma première et dernière modification si ce n'est la traduction c'est l'activation de la console en 256 couleurs par défaut. Ça me suffit je vis très bien avec !
À l'inverse, est-ce qu'il y a quelque chose que tu souhaiterais conserver à tout prix dans la distribution ou le Projet en lui même ?
J'aime me dire que c'est un produit qui évolue avec sa communauté et non pas avec une entreprise. Ce que je souhaite conserver, c'est les quatre fondations : Freedom, Friends, Features, First Les nouvelles fonctionnalités étant ce que j'apprécie beaucoup. Je suis du genre à désactiver les mises à jour auto et aimer déclencher moi-même les mises à jour afin de surveiller tout ce qui arrive.
Que penses-tu de la communauté Fedora-fr que ce soit son évolution et sa situation actuelle ? Qu'est-ce que tu améliorerais si tu en avais la possibilité ?
Malheureusement je n'en fais plus partie, j'aimerai. Mais je n'arriverai pas à retrouver le même sentiment en restant à distance, le contact physique ou régulier avec les contributeurs me manque. Mais de la même manière que la plongée ou le parapente me manque. On n'a qu'une vie et elle est remplie de choix.
Quelque chose à ajouter ?
Merci beaucoup à vous d'être encore actif, aux nouveaux d'avoir pris la relève et à tout le monde de continuer à contribuer pour ce produit. C'est tous les jours que je pense aux milliers de contributeurs Fedora et aux centaines de contributeurs que j'ai connus personnellement.
Merci Kévin pour ta contribution !
Conclusion
Nous espérons que cet entretien vous a permis d'en découvrir un peu plus sur le site Fedora-fr.
Si vous avez des questions ou que vous souhaitez participer au Projet Fedora ou Fedora-fr, ou simplement l'utiliser et l'installer sur votre machine, n'hésitez pas à en discuter avec nous en commentaire ou sur le forum Fedora-fr.
À dans 10 jours pour un entretien avec Aurélien Bompard, développeur au sein du Projet Fedora et employé Red Hat affecté au Projet Fedora en particulier dans l'équipe infrastructure.
Some of our most active users chose syslog-ng because of its detailed and accurate documentation (https://syslog-ng.github.io/). Later I received complaints that it is too detailed, and we need a tutorial: https://peter.czanik.hu/posts/syslog-ng-tutorial-toc/. This time, I was asked for something even shorter. Here you are!
Before you begin
If you want to configure syslog-ng, you have to install it first. There are way too many ways to install syslog-ng, but I cannot include that many details here. Possibilities range from installing syslog-ng from a package included in your Linux distribution, through installing it from a 3rd party repository, like ours, to building syslog-ng from source. In either case, you end up with syslog-ng installed in your environment and a default syslog-ng configuration.
Configuring syslog-ng
The default configuration usually collects local log messages in one or more text files. It is perfect for standalone workstations, but the main strength of syslog-ng is central log collection. Here we will learn about the main building blocks of a syslog-ng configuration and building a minimal syslog-ng configuration to collect log messages centrally.
This is the shortest config I can think of. Of course, shorter identifiers and file names could make it even shorter, just as removing any white space. There is also an alternative syntax to make it shorter, however that is confusing for new users, and sometimes even to seasoned professionals.
So, what do you see in this configuration? It starts with declaring the version number. This ensures that you get appropriate warnings if you use an old config with a new syslog-ng.
Next, you will see three configuration blocks. Each one states the kind of building block first, like source, destination or log, all of which, except for log, have unique names. The other configurations are optional. By tradition, each name starts with a letter referring to the type of the block. This is not mandatory, and many Linux distros have a different naming scheme.
Each source and destination might include multiple drivers. The system() source collects platform-specific local logs. The internal() source collects syslog-ng’s own logs. The file() destination writes logs to a file.
The log statement (or log path) is a bit special: it connects the various building blocks together. In this case, it makes sure that logs from the s_sys source are written to the d_mesg destination.
As you can see, the formatting of the configuration is pretty much flexible. One line, multiple lines, white space, no white space, it is up to you. Formatting can make the config easier to read, but syslog-ng does not need it.
Adding a filter and more
I extended the previous configuration a bit. The changes are marked with bold:
@version:4.8
@include "scl.conf"
source s_sys {
system();
internal();
};
# this is a comment
destination d_mesg { file("/var/log/messages.${MONTH}.${DAY}"); };
filter f_default { level(info..emerg) and not (facility(mail)); };
log {
source(s_sys);
filter(f_default); destination(d_mesg);
};
You can include other configuration files. “scl.conf” is a special one, as this name stands for the syslog-ng configuration library, which includes many useful configuration snippets. For example, parsers for Apache access logs or an Elasticsearch destination.
You can use comments to explain more complex parts of your configuration.
You can use macros in file names. In this example, instead of a single log file, a new one is created each day, and named after the current month and day. If you do additional message parsing, you could also use values parsed from log messages: for example, user names.
You can use blank lines to separate building blocks. Unfortunately, I could not mark them with bold :-)
I also added a filter, which means that I defined the filter, and included in the log path. I also defined a filter and included it in the log path. There is no need to add new lines to the configuration, therefore I placed the filter in the same line as the reference to the destination.
Adding a network source and a few more destinations
This configuration adds a network source and a few destinations to show that you can use a configuration block multiple times in your configuration.
Here, I added a source and two more destinations, and, of course, also connected them in two log statements:
s_syslog collects RFC5424-compliant log messages at port 601 over non-encrypted TCP connections.
d_fromnet writes log messages to two different files. The first one is a regular syslog-formatted destination. The second one writes logs with a JSON template function, with all name-value pairs parsed from log messages included.
d_elasticsearch stores log data to an Elasticsearch database. It uses the JSON template function for message formatting, and it formats dates to be accepted by Elasticsearch.
The first log statement sends both local and network source log messages to the Elasticsearch destination. Here you can see that various building blocks can be used multiple times. Logs from s_src are written in a file, and also sent to the Elasticsearch destination.
The second log statement stores logs from the network source into files.
What is next?
Of course, while this blog is enough to understand the basic concepts of syslog-ng configuration, it did not cover all possibilities. There are parsers and other configuration elements, you can make things conditional with an if statement within a log path, and you can define sources and others within a log statement in-line, just to mention a few.
If you have questions or comments related to syslog-ng, do not hesitate to contact us. You can reach us by email or even chat with us. For a list of possibilities, check our GitHub page under the “Community” section at https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng. On Twitter, I am available as @PCzanik, on Mastodon as @Pczanik@fosstodon.org.
It’s already been a month, I can’t imagine how time flies so fast, busy time?? Flock, Fedora DEI and Documentation workshop?? All in one month.
As a Fedora Outreachy intern, my first month has been packed with learning and contributions. This blog shares what I worked on and how I learned to navigate open source communities.
First, I would like to give a shoutout to my amazing Mentor, Jona Azizaj for all the effort she has put into supporting me. Thank You, Jona!
Highlights from June
Fedora DEI & Docs Workshop
One of the biggest milestones this month was planning and hosting my first Fedora DEI & Docs Workshop. This virtual event introduced new contributors to Fedora documentation, showed them how to submit changes, and gave a live demo of fixing an issue – definitely a learning experience in event organizing!
You can check the Discourse post; all information is in the post itself, including slides and comments.
Flock 2025 recap
I wrote a detailed Flock to Fedora recap article, covering the first two days of talks streamed from Prague. From big announcements about Fedora’s future to deep dives into mentorship, the sessions were both inspiring and practical. Read the blog magazine recap.
Documentation contributions
This month, I have contributed to multiple docs areas, including:
DEI team docs – Updated all the broken links in the docs.
Outreachy DEI page, and Outreachy mentored projects pages(under review) – I updated content and added examples of past interns, how Outreachy shaped their journey even beyond the internship.
Past event section – Documented successful Fedora DEI activities. It serves as an archive for our past events.
Collaboration and learning
The good part? It’s great to work closely with others, and I’m learning this in the open source space. I spend some time working with other teams as well:
Mindshare Committee – Learned how to request funding for events
Design team – I had an amazing postcards prepared, thanks to the Design team
Marketing – Got the Docs workshop promoted to different Fedora social accounts
Documentation team – Especially with Petr Bokoc, who shared a detailed guide on how you can easily contribute to the Docs pages.
A great learning experience. One thing I could say about people in Open source (in Fedora), they’re super amazing, gentle Cheers – I’m enjoying my journey.
My role in Join Fedora SIG
Oh, I thought it’s good to mention this as well, I am also part of the Join SIG, which helps newcomers find their place in Fedora. I’ve been able to understand how the community works, onboarding and mentorship.
What I’ve learned
How to collaborate asynchronously – Video calls, and chats.
How to chair meetings – I chaired two DEI Team meetings this month. The first one was challenging, but the second, I felt confident and even enjoyed it. I can tell I didn’t know how meetings are held in text
How open source works – From budgeting to marketing, I’m learning how many moving pieces make Fedora possible.
What’s next
I plan to revisit the Event checklist and revamp it, work with my mentor Jona and make it meaningful and useful for future events.
Also to continue improving the DEI docs, and promoting Fedora’s DEI work.
Last word
This month has already been full of learning and growth. If you’re also interested in helping out the DEI work, reach out to us in the matrix room.
I've spent time over the last month enabling Blackwell support on NVK, the Mesa vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs. Faith from Collabora, the NVK maintainer has cleaned up and merged all the major pieces of this work and landed them into mesa this week. Mesa 25.2 should ship with a functioning NVK on blackwell. The code currently in mesa main passes all tests in the Vulkan CTS.
Quick summary of the major fun points:
Ben @ NVIDIA had done the initial kernel bringup in to r570 firmware in the nouveau driver. I worked with Ben on solidifying that work and ironing out a bunch of memory leaks and regressions that snuck in.
Once the kernel was stable, there were a number of differences between Ada and Blackwell that needed to be resolved. Thanks to Faith, Mel and Mohamed for their help, and NVIDIA for providing headers and other info.
I did most of the work on a GB203 laptop and a desktop 5080.
1. Instruction encoding: a bunch of instructions changed how they were encoded. Mel helped sort out most of those early on.
2. Compute/QMD: the QMD which is used to launch compute shaders, has a new encoding. NVIDIA released the official QMD headers which made this easier in the end.
3. Texture headers: texture headers were encoded different from Hopper on, so we had to use new NVIDIA headers to encode those properly
4. Depth/Stencil: NVIDIA added support for separate d/s planes and this also has some knock on effects on surface layouts.
5. Surface layout changes. NVIDIA attaches a memory kind to memory allocations, due to changes in Blackwell, they now use a generic kind for all allocations. You now longer know the internal bpp dependent layout of the surfaces. This means changes to the dma-copy engine to provide that info. This means we have some modifier changes to cook with NVIDIA over the next few weeks at least for 8/16 bpp surfaces. Mohamed helped get this work and host image copy support done.
6. One thing we haven't merged is bound texture support. Currently blackwell is using bindless textures which might be a little slower. Due to changes in the texture instruction encoding, you have to load texture handles to intermediate uniform registers before using them as bound handles. This causes a lot of fun with flow control and when you can spill uniform registers. I've written a few efforts at using bound textures, so we understand how to use them, just have some compiler issues to maybe get it across the line.
7. Proper instruction scheduling isn't landed yet. I have a spreadsheet with all the figures, and I started typing, so will try and get that into an MR before I take some holidays.
Hi everyone, I’m working on building a service to make it easier for packagers to submit new packages to Fedora, improving upon and staying in line with the current submission process. My main focus is to automate away trivial tasks, provide fast and clear feedback, and tightly integrate with Git-based workflows that developers are familiar with.
This month
I focused on presenting a high-level architecture of the service of the project to the Fedora community and collecting early feedback. These discussions were incredibly helpful in shaping the design of the project. In particular, they helped surface early concerns and identify important edge cases that we will need to support.
The key decision is to go with a monorepo model: Each new package submission will be a Pull Request to a central repository where contributors submit their spec files and related metadata.
The service will focus on:
Running a series of automated checks on the package (e.g rpmlint)
Detecting common issues early.
Reporting the feedback and results in the same PR thread for fast feedback loops.
Keeping the logic abstract and forge-agnostic, reuse packit-service’s code and layer new handlers on top of it.
Currently, Working on setting up the local development environment and testing for the project with packit-service.
What’s Next ?
I’ll be working on getting a reliable testing environment ready and write code for COPR integration for builds and the next series of post build checks. All the code can be found at avant .
Thanks to my mentor Frantisek Lachman and the community for the great feedback and support.
I should have mentioned this here a week ago. The Vulkan AV1 encode extension has been out for a while, and I'd done the initial work on enabling it with radv on AMD GPUs. I then left it in a branch, which Benjamin from AMD picked up and fixed a bunch of bugs, and then we both got distracted. I realised when doing VP9 that it hasn't landed, so did a bit of cleanup. Then David from AMD picked it up and carried it over the last mile and it got merged last week.
So radv on supported hw now supports all vulkan decode/encode formats currently available.
Just when you thought it was safe to go to court, think again.
Your lawyer might not have your best interests at heart and even
worse, they may be working for the other side.
In 2014, journalists discovered Victoria Police had a secret
informer, a mole snitching on the underworld, identified by the
code name Lawyer X.
It was beyond embarassing: not only did police have the burden
of protecting their secret informer, they may also have to
protect her relatives who share the same name. The most
notable among them, the informer's uncle,
James Gobbo,
a supreme court judge who subsequently served as Governor
for the State of Victoria.
There is absolutely no suggestion that Lawyer X's
relatives had anything to do with her misdeeds. Nonetheless,
the clients she betrayed were the biggest crooks in town,
until, of course, her unethical behavior gave them the opportunity
to have those convictions overturned and present themselves as
model citizens once again. Any relatives or
former business associates of Lawyer X, including
the former governor, would be in danger for the rest of their
lives.
James Gobbo and his son
James Gobbo junior are both Old Xaverians,
graduates of Melbourne's elite Jesuit school for boys, like my
father and I.
Lawyer X was eventually revealed to be
Nicola Gobbo,
a graduate of the elite girls school Genazzano FCJ College.
My aunt, that is my father's sister, also went to Genazzano.
Alumni communications typically refer to Old Xaverians with
the symbols "OX" and the year of graduation, for example,
"OX96" for somebody who graduated in 1996.
Whenever a scandal like this arises, if the suspect is a
graduate of one of these elite schools, the newspapers will be
very quick to dramatize the upper class background.
The case of Lawyer X was a head and shoulders above
any other scandal: a former prefect and class captain who
made a career out of partying with drug lords, having their children
and simultaneously bugging their conversations for the police.
Stories like this are inconvenient for those elite schools
but in reality, I don't feel the schools are responsible when
one of these unlucky outcomes arises. The majority of students
are getting a head start in life but there is simply nothing that any
school can do to prevent one or two alumni going off the rails
like this.
Having been through this environment myself, I couldn't
believe what I was seeing in 2023 when the Swiss financial regulator (FINMA)
voluntarily published a few paragraphs from a secret judgment, using the
code name "X" to refer to a whole law office (cabinet juridique in
French) of jurists in Geneva who had ripped off their clients.
The Gobbo family, Genazzano FCJ College and alumni have finally been
vindicated. The misdeeds of Lawyer X pale in comparison to the
crimes of the Swiss law firm X.
Lawyer X was a former member of a political party.
One of the jurists from Law firm X was working for the rogue law office
at the same time that he was a member of Geneva city council.
He is a member of the same political party as the Swiss president from
that era.
In 1993, Lawyer X was an editor of Farrago, Australia's leading
student newspaper. Law firm X used the
Swiss media to write positive stories about their company.
When the same company was outlawed, nanny-state laws prevented the media reporting
anything at all about its downfall. Ironically,
one of my former clients was also an editor of Farrago before he became
Australia's Minister for Finance. The word Farrago gives a fascinating
insight into the life of Lawyer X.
Here is a sample sentence using the word Farrago in the
Cambridge dictionary:
... told us a farrago of lies
When FINMA revealed the secret judgment shuttering Law Firm X,
Urban Angehrn, the FINMA director, resigned citing health reasons.
His dramatic resignation helped bury news stories about the Law firm X judgment.
In Australia, a number of chief commissioners have resigned. In fact, Victoria
Police have been through three leaders in the last year.
Who predicted Elon Musk would acquire Twitter?
In 2018, I attended the UN Forum on Business and Human Rights,
where I made this brief intervention predicting the future of Facebook and
Twitter. When
Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, he called it X.
Go figure.
Just a day or two more until the big datacenter move!
I'm hopeful that it will go pretty well, but you never know.
Datacenter move
Early last week we were still deploying things in the new datacenter,
and installing machines. I ran into all kinds of trouble installing
our staging openshift cluster. Much of it around versions of images
or installer binaries or kernels. Openshift seems fond of 'latest'
as a version, but thats not really helpfull all the time. Especially
when we wanted to install 4.18 instead of the just released 4.19.
I did manage to finally fix all my mistakes and get it going in the end though.
We got our new ipa clusters setup and replicating from the old dc to new.
We got new rabbitmq clusters (rhel9 instead of rhel8 and newer rabbitmq) setup
and ready.
With that almost everything is installed (except for a few 'hot spare' type things
that we can do after the move, and buildvm's...which I will be deploying
this weekend.
On thursday we moved our staging env and it mostly went pretty well I think.
There's still some applications that need to be deployed or fixed up, but
overall it should mostly be functional. We can fix things up as time
permits.
We still have an outstanding issue with how our power10's are configured.
Turns out we do need a hardware management console to set things up as
we had planned. We have ordered this and will be reconfiguring things
post move. For normal ppc64le builds this shouldn't have any impact.
For composes that need nested virt, they will just fail until the week
following the move (when we have some power9's on hand to handle this case).
So, sorry ppc64le users, likely a bit of failed rawhide composes,
sorry about that.
Just a reminder about next week:
mirrorlists (dnf updates), docs/websites, downloads, discourse, matrix should all be unaffected
YOU SHOULD PLAN TO NOT TRY AND USE ANY OTHER SERVICES until the goahead (wed).
Monday:
Around 10:00 UTC services will start going down.
We will be moving storage and databases for a while.
Once databases and storage are set we will bring services back up
On monday koji will be up and you can probibly even do builds (but I strongly
advise you to not). However, bodhi will be down, so no updates will move forward
from builds done in this period.
Tuesday:
koji/build pipeline goes down.
We will be moving it's storage databases for a while.
We will bring things up once those are moved.
Wed:
Start fixing outstanding issues, deploy missing/lower pri services
At this point we can start taking problem reports to fix things (hopefully)
Thursday:
More fixing outstanding items.
Will be shutting down machines in old DC
Friday:
Holiday in the US
Hopefully things will be in a stable state by this time.
This is a weekly report from the I&R (Infrastructure & Release Engineering) Team. We provide you both infographic and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.
Week: 23 June – 27 June 2025
Infrastructure & Release Engineering
The purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work. It’s responsible for services running in Fedora and CentOS infrastructure and preparing things for the new Fedora release (mirrors, mass branching, new namespaces etc.). List of planned/in-progress issues
To take a short break from datacenter work, I have been meaning
to look into ansible lightspeed for a long time, so I finally
sat down and took an introductory course and have some thoughts
about how we might use it in on fedora's ansible setup.
The official name of the product is: "Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed
with IBM watsonx Code Assistant", which is a bit... verbose, so I will
just use 'Lightspeed' here.
This is one of the very first AI products Red Hat produced, so
its been around a few years. Some of that history is probibly why
it's specifically using watsonx instead of some other LLMs on the
backend.
First a list of things I really like about it:
It's actually trained on real, correct, good ansible content.
It's not a 'general' LLM trained on the internet, it's using some
ansible galaxy content (you can opt out if you prefer) as well
as a bunch of curated content from real ansible. This always
struck me as one of the very best ways to leverage LLMs instead
of general hoover in any data and use it. In this case it really
helps make the suggestions and content more trustable and less
hallucinated.
Depending on the watsonx subscription you have, you may train
it on _your_ ansible content. Perhaps you have different standards
than others or particular ways you do things. You can train it
on them and actually get it to give you output that uses that.
Having something be able to generate a biolerplate for you that
you can review and fix up is also a really great use for llms, IMHO.
And some things I'm not crazy about:
It requires AAP (ansible automation platform) and watsonx licenses.
(mostly, see below). It would be cool if it could leverage a local
model or Red Hat AI in openshift instead of watsonx, but as noted above
it's likely tied to that for historical reasons.
It uses a vscode plugin. I'm much more a vim type old sysadmin,
and the idea of making a small ansible playbook thats just a text
file seems like vscode is... overkill. I can of course see why they
choose to implement things this way.
And something I sure didn't know: There's an ansible code bot on github.
It can scan your ansible git repo and file a PR to bring it in line with
best practices. Pretty cool. We have a mirror of our pagure ansible repo
on gitub, however, it seems to be not mirroring. I want to sort that out
and then enable the bot to see how it does. :)
Image mode, aka. “bootable containers�, aka. “bootc� is an exciting new way to
build and deploy operating systems. A bootable container image can be used to
install or upgrade a real or virtual machine, similar to container images for
applications. This is currently supported for
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9/10
and Fedora/CentOS, but also in
other projects like universal-blue.
With system roles being the supported high-level API to set up
Fedora/RHEL/CentOS systems, we want to make them compatible with image mode
builds. In particular, we need to make them detect the “non-booted� environment
and adjust their behaviour to not e.g. try to start systemd units or talk to
network services, and defer all of that to the first boot. We also need to add
full bootc end-to-end integration tests to ensure this keeps working in the
future on all supported platforms.
Build process
This can work in two ways. Both ought to work, and which one you choose depends
on your available infrastructure and preferences.
Treat a container build as an Ansible host
Start a container build with e.g.
buildah from --name buildc quay.io/centos-bootc/centos-bootc:stream10
Install Ansible and the system roles into the container
The Containerfile looks roughly like this:
FROM quay.io/centos-bootc/centos-bootc:stream10
RUN dnf -y install ansible-core rhel-system-roles
COPY ./setup.yml .
RUN ansible-playbook setup.yml
Everything happens inside of the image build, and the playbooks run against
localhost. This could use a multi-stage
build to avoid having
Ansible and the roles in the final image. This is entirely self-contained and
thus works well in automatic container build pipelines.
⚠� Warning: Unfortunately this is currently broken for many/most roles because
of an Ansible bug: service: fails in a container build environment.
Once that is fixed, this approach will work well and might often be the
preferred choice.
Status
This effort is tracked in the RHEL-78157 epic.
At the time of writing, 15 roles are already supported, the other 22 still need to be updated.
Roles which support image mode builds have the containerbuild tag, which you
can see in the Ansible Galaxy view (expand the tag list at the top), or in the source code in meta/main.yml.
Note that some roles also have a container tag, which means that they are
tested and supported in a running system container (i.e. a docker/podman
container with the /sbin/init entry point, or LXC/nspawn etc.), but not
during a non-booted container build.
Steps for converting a role
Helping out with that effort is very much appreciated! If you are interested in
making a particular role compatible with image mode builds, please follow these steps:
Clone the role’s upstream git repository. Make sure that its meta/main.yml
file does not yet have a containerbuild tag – if it does, the role was
already converted. In that case, please update the status in the epic.
Familiarize yourself with the purpose of the role, have a look at README.md,
and think about whether running the role in a container generally makes
sense. That should be the case for most of them, but e.g storage is
hardware specific and for the most part does not make sense in a container
build environment.
Make sure your developer machine can run tests in in general. Do the
integration test setup and also read the following sections about running QEMU and container tests.
E.g. running a QEMU test should work:
The most common causes of failures are service_facts: which just simply
doesn’t work in a container, and trying to set the state: of a unit in
service:. The existing PRs linked from RHEL-78157
have plenty of examples what to do with these.
The logging role PR
is a good example for the standard approach of adding a
__rolename_is_booted flag to the role variables, and use that to
conditionalize operations and tests which
can’t work in a container. E.g. the above service: status: can be fixed
with
state:"started"
service_facts: can be replaced with systemctl is-enabled or similar, see e.g. the corresponding
mssql fix or
firewall fix.
Do these “standard recipe� fixes to clear away the easy noise.
As described above, the container tag means that the role is supported and
works in (booted) system containers. In most cases this is fairly easy to
fix, and nice to have, as running tests and iterating is faster, and
debugging is also a bit easier. In some cases running in system containers
is hard (like in the selinux or podman roles), in that case don’t bother and
remove that tag again.
Go through the other failures. You can download the log archive and/or run
the individual tests locally. The following command helps for easier debugging – it
keeps the container running for inspection after a failure, and removes
containers and temp files from the previous run:
Add an end-to-end integration test which ensures that running the role
during a container build actually works as intended in a QEMU deployment.
If there is an existing integration test which has representative complexity
and calls the role just once (i.e. tests one scenario), you can convert it
like
sudo’s bootc e2e test.
If there is no existing test, you can also add a specific bootc e2e test
like in
this demo PR
or the
postgresql role.
Il defunto Papa Francesco chiese a un gruppo di circa quattrocento vescovi di lavorare insieme dal 2021 al 2024 per analizzare il modo in cui i fedeli
cattolici interagiscono e si sviluppano come movimento. Formalmente, a questo comitato di vescovi fu dato il titolo di
Sinodo sulla sinodalità . Il termine Sinodo è ampiamente utilizzato in tutte le religioni cristiane per riferirsi a comitati, consigli o riunioni di tali gruppi a qualsiasi livello della gerarchia ecclesiastica. Il termine
sinodalità è specifico della Chiesa cattolica. Il Sinodo ha una pagina web ufficiale in cui
cerca di spiegare la sinodalità .
Sono stati creati diversi gruppi di lavoro su un'ampia gamma di argomenti. In questa analisi, mi limiterò a esaminare il gruppo di lavoro numero tre, che ha esaminato il tema
della missione nell'ambiente digitale . Successivamente, fornirò alcune mie prove sugli argomenti che il gruppo di lavoro sta prendendo in considerazione.
Anche
i ripetitori di pacchetti
per radio amatoriali rientrano nel campo di applicazione, sebbene le licenze per radio amatoriali non consentano la trasmissione esplicita di materiale religioso.
Il Vaticano è stato uno dei primi ad adottare la radio a onde corte. Papa Leone XIV e monsignor Lucio Adrian Ruiz, segretario del Dicastero per la Comunicazione, hanno visitato questa settimana la sede della Radio Vaticana:
Leggendo i risultati sia del gruppo di lavoro che del Sinodo nel suo complesso, ritengo che la Chiesa nel suo complesso non abbia deciso né di accogliere né di rifiutare
i media di controllo sociale . Stanno riconoscendo che fanno parte del panorama digitale e stanno cercando di decidere come la Chiesa si relaziona ad esso.
Come si è evoluto il processo sinodale ad alto livello
Prima di entrare nei dettagli, ecco una panoramica del processo e dei resoconti pubblicati in momenti diversi, con link diretti alle edizioni tradotte.
Il sito web principale del Sinodo è
www.Synod.va ed è disponibile in diverse lingue. A quanto pare, il contenuto è stato creato in italiano e tradotto in inglese e in altre lingue. Questo lo rende un po' più difficile da leggere.
Nell'ottobre 2023 si è svolto un lungo incontro a Roma durante il quale è stata elaborata una bozza iniziale del rapporto.
Punti chiave del rapporto finale in relazione all'ambiente digitale
Al punto 58, il rapporto osserva che i cristiani potrebbero tentare di proclamare il Vangelo attraverso la loro partecipazione in un ambiente digitale.
58. ... I cristiani, ciascuno secondo i suoi diversi ruoli - nella famiglia e negli altri stati di vita; nel mondo del lavoro e nelle professioni; impegnati civilmente, politicamente, socialmente o ecologicamente; nello sviluppo di una cultura ispirata al Vangelo, inclusa l'evangelizzazione dell'ambiente digitale - percorrono le strade del mondo e annunciano il Vangelo lì dove vivono, sostenuti dai doni dello Spirito.
59. Così facendo, chiedono alla Chiesa di non abbandonarli, ma di farli sentire inviati e sostenuti nella missione.
Questo punto sembra incoraggiare la Chiesa a riflettere sulla situazione affrontata da coloro che sono sotto l'influenza di un ambiente digitale, ma non implica necessariamente che l'ambiente digitale sia buono o cattivo.
Al punto 112, riguardante la mobilità, che comprende persone di tutti i livelli sociali, il rapporto osserva:
Alcuni mantengono forti legami con il loro Paese d'origine, soprattutto grazie ai media digitali, e per questo motivo può risultare difficile stabilire legami nel nuovo Paese; altri si ritrovano a vivere senza radici.
Questa è un'osservazione eccellente. In Europa, ho incontrato coppie le cui relazioni dipendono interamente dai dispositivi che usano per la traduzione automatica. Quando arrivano nuovi arrivati &ZeroWidthSpace&ZeroWidthSpacein città, la cultura di WhatsApp incoraggia i vicini a passare settimane o mesi a parlare alle loro spalle senza mai guardarli negli occhi.
113. La diffusione della cultura digitale, particolarmente evidente tra i giovani, sta cambiando profondamente la loro esperienza dello spazio e del tempo, influenzando le loro attività quotidiane, la comunicazione e le relazioni interpersonali, inclusa la fede. Le opportunità che offre internet stanno ridisegnando relazioni, legami e confini. Oggi sperimentiamo spesso solitudine ed emarginazione, anche se siamo più connessi che mai. Inoltre, coloro che hanno interessi economici e politici propri possono usare
i social media per diffondere ideologie e generare forme di polarizzazione aggressive e manipolatrici. Non siamo ben preparati a questo e dobbiamo dedicare risorse affinché l’ambiente digitale diventi uno spazio profetico per la missione e l’annuncio. Le Chiese locali devono incoraggiare, sostenere e accompagnare quanti si impegnano nella missione nell’ambiente digitale. Le comunità e i gruppi digitali cristiani, in particolare i giovani, sono chiamati anche a riflettere sul modo in cui creano legami di appartenenza, promuovendo l’incontro e il dialogo. Devono offrire formazione ai loro coetanei, sviluppando un modo sinodale di essere Chiesa. Internet, costituito come una rete di connessioni, offre nuove opportunità per vivere meglio la dimensione sinodale della Chiesa.
Questo paragrafo riconosce i pericoli della tecnologia digitale, in particolare
dei social media che controllano la società , e le parole chiave sono "Non siamo ben preparati a questo". Tuttavia, suggerisce che le chiese locali dovrebbero "incoraggiare" a ridurre questi rischi online. Non credo che "incoraggiare" sia la parola giusta da usare, ma non credo nemmeno che dovrebbero scoraggiare.
149. Il processo sinodale ha richiamato con insistenza l'attenzione su alcuni ambiti specifici della formazione del Popolo di Dio alla sinodalità. Il primo di questi riguarda l'impatto dell'ambiente digitale sui processi di apprendimento, sulla concentrazione, sulla percezione di sé e del mondo e sulla costruzione delle relazioni interpersonali. La cultura digitale costituisce una dimensione cruciale della testimonianza della Chiesa nella cultura contemporanea e un campo missionario emergente. Ciò richiede di garantire che il messaggio cristiano sia presente online in modi affidabili che non ne distorcano ideologicamente i contenuti. Sebbene i media digitali abbiano un grande potenziale per migliorare le nostre vite, possono anche causare danni e lesioni attraverso il bullismo, la disinformazione, lo sfruttamento sessuale e la dipendenza. Le istituzioni educative della Chiesa devono aiutare i bambini e gli adulti a sviluppare competenze critiche per navigare in sicurezza nel web.
Questi commenti sono molto pertinenti e molto coerenti con la mia testimonianza, parte della quale è riprodotta più avanti in questa relazione.
150. Un altro ambito di grande importanza è la promozione in tutti i contesti ecclesiali di una cultura della tutela, rendendo le comunità luoghi sempre più sicuri per i minori e le persone vulnerabili.
Quando ho sollevato questo argomento nelle comunità del software libero, la mia famiglia è stata attaccata senza pietà. Si vedano le
email che ho inviato alla fine del 2017 e i commenti su IBM
Red Hat più avanti in questo rapporto.
Fonti relative al gruppo di lavoro tre, la missione in un ambiente digitale
Il sito web di Synod.va ha pubblicato l'elenco di
tutti i gruppi di lavoro . Il sito web include un breve video su ciascun gruppo e un link ai loro rapporti più recenti.
Il video del gruppo di lavoro tre dura poco meno di due minuti. Ecco alcune delle citazioni chiave e le mie osservazioni:
"Oggi le persone, soprattutto i giovani, hanno imparato a vivere contemporaneamente e senza soluzione di continuità sia negli spazi digitali che in quelli fisici."
Le affermazioni contenute nel video non sono quelle presentate nel rapporto finale. Ci arriveremo. Ciononostante, ogni volta che
si parla
di controllo sociale sui media , si tende a generalizzare sull'impossibilità di vivere senza. Ogni volta che vediamo un'affermazione come questa, è importante contestarla.
"In che modo la Chiesa utilizza e si appropria della cultura digitale?"
La domanda retorica è interessante. In realtà, i superpoteri della Silicon Valley usano e si appropriano di qualsiasi contenuto che forniamo loro. La chiesa non usa loro, usa noi. Come pensi che siano diventati così ricchi?
Una domanda più appropriata potrebbe essere: "In che modo la Chiesa
supplisce alle carenze delle culture digitali?".
"Questo ambiente è ormai "indistinguibile dalla sfera della vita quotidiana".
Papa Francesco era un uomo intelligente e aveva intorno a sé persone intelligenti, tra cui il defunto Cardinale Pell. Possiamo far risalire questa citazione al pensiero di Alan Turing. Turing è considerato il padre dell'informatica e un martire. Turing ci ha trasmesso esattamente lo stesso concetto nel leggendario test di Turing, che lo stesso Turing definì il gioco dell'imitazione nel 1949.
Un altro modo di interpretare questo fenomeno è dire che le masse sono state plagiate dai signori della Silicon Valley.
Le scelte prese dai vertici di Facebook rappresentano un problema enorme – per i bambini, per la sicurezza pubblica, per la democrazia – ed è per questo che mi sono fatto avanti. E sia chiaro: non deve andare per forza così. Siamo qui oggi grazie alle scelte deliberate di Facebook.
Il riassunto del gruppo di lavoro continua...
Per annunciare efficacemente il Vangelo nella nostra cultura contemporanea, dobbiamo discernere le opportunità e le sfide presentate da questa nuova dimensione del “luogo”
Ciononostante, il rapporto include l'espressione "maggiore immersione" e ritengo che la Chiesa non dovrebbe dare per scontato che questa sia una linea d'azione predefinita.
La sintesi affronta anche il concetto di giurisdizione. La Chiesa cattolica si è tradizionalmente organizzata su base geografica. Internet permette alle persone di connettersi e formare comunità virtuali senza alcuna connessione geografica.
Tra l'altro, prima di Internet, la Chiesa poteva spostare sacerdoti ad alto rischio da una parrocchia all'altra senza doversi preoccupare di eventuali collegamenti. Ho esaminato meticolosamente i documenti della Commissione Reale australiana e ho trovato questa nota del leggendario Padre X___:
Ciò significa che se qualcuno in Australia venisse a sapere che Padre Z___ è in cura a causa di qualcosa accaduto a Boston e andasse lì per scoprirlo, si troverebbe in un vicolo cieco.
La lettera in questione è stata scritta poco prima che Internet diventasse di dominio pubblico. Rileggendo quelle parole oggi, ci ricordano con chiarezza come Internet stia stravolgendo la nostra vita.
Il gruppo di lavoro prosegue affermando che sta cercando "raccomandazioni o proposte pratiche" da tutta la comunità su qualsiasi argomento correlato alla missione della Chiesa nell'ambiente digitale.
Le persone impegnate nel movimento del software libero, siano esse
cattoliche o meno, possono contattare la propria diocesi locale per scoprire chi coordina a livello locale la risposta a queste sfide.
Un'altra frase che mi ha colpito:
"oggi viviamo in una cultura digitale"
Non esattamente. Alcuni direbbero che ci viene imposta una cultura digitale. Istituzioni come la politica e i media ne sono dipendenti e la mettono su un piedistallo. Pertanto, è ancora più vitale che altre istituzioni, come la Chiesa, si assumano il compito di mettere in discussione ogni aspetto della cultura digitale e di promuovere valide alternative.
La vita senza cellulari, la vita senza app
Telefoni cellulari e app sono strettamente correlati. Alcune persone scelgono di vivere senza uno smartphone, in altre parole, hanno solo la metà dei problemi di un telefono cellulare completo. Alcune persone scelgono anche di avere smartphone senza l'app store di Google o Apple, ad esempio chi installa
Replicant o
LineageOS e utilizza l'
app store di F-Droid per limitare il proprio telefono alle app etiche.
In termini pratici, ci sono persone che non riescono a spostarsi nella propria città natale senza usare il telefono. Un interrogativo interessante per la chiesa è: quale percentuale di fedeli non è in grado di identificare il percorso più diretto da casa alla chiesa più vicina senza usare un'app? Sarebbe interessante analizzare le risposte in base a diversi fattori, come l'età e gli anni di residenza nella parrocchia.
Un'altra domanda chiave, strettamente correlata a quella precedente, è: quanti parrocchiani riescono a ricordare gli orari delle messe e gli eventi chiave del calendario parrocchiale senza guardare il telefono? È fantastico avere queste informazioni visibili sul sito web della parrocchia; tuttavia, quando le persone sono veramente coinvolte nella parrocchia e nella comunità, queste informazioni vengono memorizzate. Più queste informazioni sono diffuse in una comunità, più questa è resiliente.
I sistemi di autenticazione minano la dignità umana
Oggigiorno vediamo spesso aziende che insistono sul fatto che hanno bisogno dei nostri numeri di cellulare per "autenticarci" o per "firmare" documenti tramite SMS.
Questo tipo di cose è particolarmente inquietante. Molte persone hanno familiarità con la pratica nazista di marchiare a fuoco i numeri di identificazione sulla pelle dei prigionieri ebrei. I numeri di cellulare hanno una funzione simile. Anche se i numeri non vengono marchiati a fuoco sulla pelle, spesso è scomodo per le persone cambiare il proprio numero.
Esistono molti fenomeni strettamente correlati, tra cui siti web che richiedono agli utenti di autenticarsi tramite un account Gmail o Facebook.
A livello di Chiesa, Stato, istruzione, assistenza sanitaria e servizi finanziari, è fondamentale garantire che tutti possano partecipare nel modo che desiderano senza rinunciare alla propria dignità.
La Chiesa deve esprimersi su questi argomenti con la stessa voce con cui si esprime su temi come l'aborto.
È necessario sottolineare il consenso
Le preoccupazioni relative al consenso e alla coercizione sono diventate un tema di grande attualità nel mondo di oggi. Ironicamente, le
piattaforme
di controllo sociale che fingono di aiutare le donne a trovare una piattaforma violano il principio del consenso in molti altri modi.
Si consideri, ad esempio, chi ha dedicato tempo alla creazione di un profilo su Facebook o Twitter, a volte per molti anni, connettendosi con centinaia o migliaia di follower, per poi ritrovarsi a dover aggiungere il proprio numero di cellulare al proprio account. Se non lo fanno, l'account viene bloccato. Non esiste una vera e propria ragione tecnica per avere un numero di cellulare nell'account, poiché molti di questi servizi hanno funzionato esattamente allo stesso modo per molti anni prima che tali richieste diventassero comuni.
Le persone non acconsentono liberamente a condividere i propri numeri di telefono con Mark Zuckerberg ed Elon Musk. I servizi sono stati imbastarditi per tendere un'imboscata ai loro utenti con queste richieste.
È significativo che questa cultura di agguati e costrizioni si insinui nella società. In Australia, Chanel Contos ha lanciato una petizione/rivista molto pubblicizzata con storie di donne di scuole private d'élite che si sentivano vittime di agguati, bullismo e costrette a incontri fisici indesiderati.
Ironicamente, la signorina Contos ha reso pubbliche le sue preoccupazioni proprio attraverso le stesse piattaforme che stanno minando la nostra comprensione del consenso e della privacy.
La Chiesa stessa ha dovuto fare un profondo esame di coscienza sui temi del consenso e degli abusi di potere. Questo la pone in una posizione interessante, in cui possiamo affermare che, anche considerando alcune delle rivelazioni più sconvolgenti sugli abusi, i responsabili sono il male minore rispetto ai padroni della Silicon Valley.
È sorprendente la rapidità con cui le istituzioni della Silicon Valley hanno abbandonato ogni sistema di pesi e contrappesi, ritenendo opportuno fare ciò che più gli aggrada. La Chiesa cattolica e altre istituzioni religiose possono ora fare tesoro di quanto hanno imparato dall'analisi critica dei propri errori e mettere in guardia la società da quanto sarebbe stupido ripetere la stessa strada con questi gangster digitali.
La tecnologia digitale è molto più di un semplice controllo sociale dei media
La chiesa non è nuova alla tecnologia. Le prime macchine da stampa furono installate nei locali della chiesa. Caxton installò la prima macchina da stampa inglese nell'Abbazia di Westminster. Altri siti includevano Oxford e l'Abbazia di St Alban. Prima della stampa, leggere e scrivere erano attività riservate ai chierici e molte delle loro opere esistevano solo in latino. La stampa permise la produzione in serie di Bibbie in tedesco e inglese. Questo, a sua volta, ebbe un enorme impatto sulla standardizzazione della lingua, così come contribuì a standardizzare gli atteggiamenti morali che la Silicon Valley sta distruggendo sotto di noi. La versione della Bibbia di Re Giacomo è ampiamente riconosciuta per il suo impatto sulla lingua inglese.
La standardizzazione del linguaggio fu solo un effetto collaterale di questa invenzione. La Riforma fu un altro. Con l'acquisizione dei libri e della capacità di leggere, le persone divennero meno dipendenti dal clero.
Allo stesso modo,
i media di controllo sociale stanno avendo un impatto sulla nostra cultura, nel bene e nel male. Proprio come la stampa ha permesso la Riforma,
i media di controllo sociale potrebbero portare a ulteriori cambiamenti nel modo in cui gli esseri umani si organizzano attorno a strutture e credenze religiose. I signori della Silicon Valley stanno attivamente riflettendo su questi ruoli. Elon Musk si è persino travestito da Satana. Se la Chiesa cattolica non offrirà un'alternativa convincente a questi spostamenti di potere, verrà sottratta al suo controllo.
Frances Haugen (informatrice di Facebook): quasi nessuno al di fuori di Facebook sa cosa succede al suo interno. I vertici dell'azienda nascondono informazioni vitali al pubblico, al governo degli Stati Uniti, ai suoi azionisti e ai governi di tutto il mondo. I documenti che ho fornito dimostrano che Facebook ci ha ripetutamente ingannato su ciò che le sue stesse ricerche rivelano sulla sicurezza dei bambini, sul suo ruolo nella diffusione di messaggi d'odio e divisivi e molto altro ancora.
Mentre le generazioni precedenti si rivolgevano al clero per un consiglio, per poi leggere la Bibbia a loro volta, i giovani di oggi si rivolgono a un motore di ricerca e un domani potrebbero affidarsi all'intelligenza artificiale. Possiamo già osservare come motori di ricerca,
social media e bot di intelligenza artificiale spingano le persone a livelli crescenti di conflitto con i vicini o le spingano su sentieri oscuri di isolamento, autolesionismo e suicidio.
Risorse della Chiesa cattolica rilevanti per l'ambiente digitale
La Chiesa cattolica ha un ruolo importante nell'istruzione e nelle scuole, pertanto può vedere l'impatto del
controllo sociale dei media e può far rispettare i divieti per i bambini e fornire formazione al personale e ai genitori.
Gli insegnanti, in quanto dipendenti della Chiesa o dello Stato, hanno segnalato un aumento dei casi di bullismo da parte di genitori che si raggruppano sulle app di messaggistica. In un caso recente,
la polizia britannica ha inviato sei agenti a umiliare un genitore che aveva usato WhatsApp per protestare contro la scuola locale. Il conflitto, la natura conflittuale di questo ambiente e l'enorme spreco di risorse della polizia sono tutte conseguenze del modo in cui la tecnologia è progettata e utilizzata nella società. Ogni episodio come questo offre uno spunto di riflessione sulle opportunità che la Chiesa cattolica ha di chiedersi "esiste un modo migliore?".
Le parole di Frances Haugen aiutano a spiegare ai genitori di bambini piccoli l'assedio dei sei poliziotti:
Ho visto che Facebook ha ripetutamente incontrato conflitti tra i propri profitti e la nostra sicurezza. Facebook ha sistematicamente risolto questi conflitti a favore dei propri profitti. Il risultato è stato un sistema che amplifica divisione, estremismo e polarizzazione, minando le società di tutto il mondo.
La Chiesa cattolica è un importante datore di lavoro in molti paesi. Questo le conferisce la facoltà di prendere decisioni sull'uso di telefoni cellulari e app di messaggistica nel rapporto datore di lavoro/dipendente. Un datore di lavoro non può vietare ai dipendenti di utilizzare questi dispositivi nel tempo libero, ma può decidere di eliminarne l'uso ufficiale per motivi di lavoro. Il rapporto datore di lavoro/dipendente offre un'ulteriore opportunità per formare sull'importanza della dignità umana al di sopra delle esigenze dei nostri dispositivi.
L'agenda pubblica nell'ambiente digitale, l'aborto della nostra specie
Con molti politici e giornalisti che oggi vivono la loro vita sotto
il controllo dei social media , la loro capacità di valutare quali temi meritino un dibattito pubblico è fortemente influenzata dalle tematiche che si suppone siano di tendenza online. Si pensa che le tematiche siano di tendenza online in conseguenza dell'interesse pubblico, mentre in realtà i gestori delle piattaforme online esercitano la loro influenza per garantire che alcune questioni sembrino crescere in modo organico, mentre argomenti significativi ma scomodi vengono opportunamente sepolti nel flusso di notizie.
In questo contesto, la Chiesa cattolica offre una via alternativa per porre questioni all'ordine del giorno del dibattito pubblico, indipendentemente dal fatto che una particolare questione appaia "di tendenza" o meno. Questo potere viene spesso utilizzato per questioni vicine all'insegnamento della Chiesa, come il lobbying sull'aborto, ma non c'è motivo per cui la Chiesa non possa utilizzare le stesse risorse per fare lobbying contro l'aborto del genere umano da parte dell'intelligenza artificiale.
Aiuto alle vittime di discriminazione da parte dei signori della Silicon Valley e delle bande online
Le origini della Chiesa cattolica risalgono alla persecuzione di Gesù e dei martiri San Pietro e San Paolo.
Ma lasciamo da parte gli esempi antichi e veniamo a coloro che, nei tempi a noi più vicini, hanno lottato per la fede. Prendiamo i nobili esempi della nostra generazione. Per gelosia e invidia, i più grandi e giusti pilastri della Chiesa furono perseguitati e giunsero fino alla morte. Poniamo davanti ai nostri occhi i buoni Apostoli. Pietro, per ingiusta invidia, sopportò non una o due, ma molte fatiche, e alla fine, dopo aver reso la sua testimonianza, se ne andò verso il luogo di gloria che gli spettava. Anche Paolo, per invidia, mostrò con l'esempio il premio che è dato alla pazienza: fu incatenato sette volte; fu bandito; fu lapidato; divenuto araldo sia in Oriente che in Occidente, ottenne la nobile fama dovuta alla sua fede; e dopo aver predicato la giustizia al mondo intero, giunto fino all'estremità dell'Occidente e reso testimonianza davanti ai governanti, lasciò finalmente il mondo e andò verso il luogo santo, divenendo il massimo esempio di pazienza. (prima lettera di Clemente ai Corinzi, 5:1 - 5:7)
Queste parole spiegano la persecuzione di Pietro e Paolo sotto l'imperatore Nerone, avvenuta quasi duemila anni fa.
Ottocento anni fa è stata promulgata la Magna Carta che, nel corso del tempo, ha ispirato la Carta dei diritti degli Stati Uniti, la Dichiarazione universale dei diritti umani e l'abolizione della pena di morte.
Eppure oggi vediamo i signori della Silicon Valley voler buttare tutto questo dalla finestra e riportarci indietro ai tempi di Nerone.
Ogni individuo ha diritto di prendere parte liberamente alla vita culturale della comunità, di godere delle arti e di partecipare al progresso scientifico ed ai suoi benefici.
Ogni individuo ha diritto alla protezione degli interessi morali e materiali derivanti da ogni produzione scientifica, letteraria e artistica di cui egli sia autore.
Quando visitiamo i siti web di noti progetti di software libero come Debian e Fedora, li vediamo dichiarare apertamente il loro desiderio di censurare certe persone. Chiunque si esprima su questioni etiche nel nostro settore è stato oggetto di queste estreme rappresaglie di tanto in tanto.
Le somiglianze tra questi casi e la crescente lista di vittime sono la prova lampante che non si tratta di casi casuali. Esiste uno sforzo coordinato per ridurre o eludere i diritti civili. Se esiste uno spazio o un mondo digitale, allora è inquietantemente simile al mondo in cui gli imperatori romani ricorrevano a esecuzioni raccapriccianti per perpetuare il controllo attraverso la paura.
La Chiesa cattolica può andare alla ricerca delle vittime che sono state cancellate, delle vittime che sono state de-piattaformate e di coloro che hanno qualcosa da dire sulla dignità umana nell'era dell'intelligenza artificiale. Che queste persone siano
cattoliche o meno, le preoccupazioni che gli esperti indipendenti hanno cercato di indagare e pubblicizzare devono essere poste al di sopra del rumore prodotto dai dipartimenti di pubbliche relazioni.
Allo stesso tempo, l'impatto orribile inflitto alle nostre famiglie è spesso nascosto alla vista del pubblico.
I bambini nell'ambiente digitale
È significativo che abbiamo trovato tattiche molto simili utilizzate da Harvey Weinstein e Chris Lamb, ex leader del progetto Debian.
Questo è significativo perché Lamb è stato formato durante il Google Summer of Code ed è stato finanziato da Google, che ha anche ricevuto un cospicuo pagamento di 300.000 dollari poco prima che tre vittime rivelassero lo scandalo. Nonostante la promessa di trasparenza di Debian, il denaro è stato rivelato solo
più di sei mesi dopo e il nome di Google non è mai stato pubblicamente collegato a quei numeri.
Quando Weinstein nutriva preoccupazioni sul comportamento di alcune donne, inviava pettegolezzi sgradevoli sul "comportamento" ad altri membri del settore. C'è qualcosa di snob in questi atteggiamenti nei confronti del comportamento umano.
"Ricordo che la Miramax ci disse che lavorare con loro era un incubo e che avremmo dovuto evitarli a tutti i costi. Probabilmente era il 1998", ha detto Jackson.
"All'epoca non avevamo motivo di mettere in dubbio ciò che queste persone ci stavano dicendo, ma a posteriori mi rendo conto che molto probabilmente si trattava della campagna diffamatoria della Miramax in pieno svolgimento."
Diverse persone si sono fatte avanti dimostrando che Chris Lamb stava facendo esattamente la stessa cosa nel suo ruolo in Debian. Secondo la legge sul copyright, i coautori non hanno alcun obbligo nei confronti della persona eletta a ricoprire di volta in volta il ruolo di Debian Project Leader. Siamo tutti uguali.
Oggetto: R: Stato di sviluppatore Debian
Data: mar, 18 dic 2018 10:36:09 +0900
Da: Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>
A: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro>
Ciao Daniel,
anche se affrontare una causa come questa nel Regno Unito è al di sopra delle
mie capacità e possibilità finanziarie,
ho paura che Lamb abbia effettivamente rovinato una candidatura per un'azienda
di New York, un lavoro correlato a Debian. Se è successo, e posso
ragionevolmente documentarlo, prenderei in considerazione una causa per diffamazione.
> Lamb è residente nel Regno Unito e invia email dal Regno Unito
> https://regainyourname.com/news/cyberbullying-cyberstalking-and-online-harassment-a-uk-study/
Grazie per i link, li terrò a mente.
Norbert
--
PREINING Norbert http://www.preining.info
Accelia Inc. + JAIST + TeX Live + Debian Developer
GPG: 0x860CDC13 fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0 ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13
Ancora più inquietante è il fatto che Lamb abbia iniziato ad attaccare la mia famiglia proprio nello stesso periodo in cui il cardinale George Pell è stato condannato nel 2018. Un mio cugino di secondo grado era membro dell'ex coro del cardinale George Pell a Melbourne. Lamb e i suoi complici, finanziati da Google, hanno diffuso voci anonime di abusi.
Diverse persone si sono fatte avanti con prove che Lamb si comportava come Weinstein, diffondendo voci alle nostre spalle. Quando io e il Dott. Preining abbiamo parlato, una terza vittima ha visto lo scandalo e si è identificata pubblicamente il giorno di Natale:
Oggetto: Ri: Censura in Debian
Data: mar, 25 dic 2018 23:44:38 +0100
Da: martin f krafft
Organizzazione: Il progetto Debian
A: debian-project@lists.debian.org
Ciao progetto,
È molto triste leggere di quello che sta succedendo.
So che c'è stato almeno un altro caso in cui DAM e AH
hanno agito al di fuori del loro mandato, minacciando di
espellere il progetto e scegliendo in modo molto selettivo con chi comunicare.
Lo so perché sono stato preso di mira.
Né DAM né AH (le stesse persone ancora attive oggi) hanno fatto
un solo tentativo di ascoltarmi. Nessuna delle mie e-mail a DAM o ad AH
ha mai ricevuto risposta.
Al contrario, DAM ha emesso un verdetto e ha influenzato altre persone al
punto che "perché DAM ha emesso una sentenza" è stato addotto come motivazione per altre
misure. Si è trattato di un abuso incostituzionale dei poteri di DAM e, nel
caso di AH, l'intera vicenda ha anche sfiorato la diffamazione. Tra gli altri,
l'attuale DPL Chris Lamb ha promesso una revisione a tempo debito, ma
non è mai successo nulla.
... [ snip ] ...
Ma se non è sicuro per gli ingegneri che sviluppano questa tecnologia, non lo è certamente per i bambini.
Il 5 ottobre 2021 ho sollevato le preoccupazioni relative ai bambini in questa cultura con il rapporto
Google, FSFE e lavoro minorile .
Red Hat , una sussidiaria di IBM dal 2019, ha avviato un'azione legale per censurare e screditare le mie preoccupazioni. Mi hanno accusato di malafede per aver pubblicato quell'articolo. Tuttavia, il collegio legale ha stabilito che
Red Hat mi stava molestando e che stava commettendo un abuso della procedura amministrativa.
L'ironia, ovviamente, è che i Cardinali indossano cappelli rossi, come il nome dell'azienda
Red Hat che è stata scoperta a maltrattarmi. Chris Lamb di Debian aveva diffuso voci sulla mia famiglia quando il Cardinale Pell fu condannato.
Il modo in cui tutto questo ha intersecato le nostre vite e la nostra fede, le voci di abusi dopo la condanna del defunto Cardinale Pell, la mia visita ai Carabinieri il giorno della morte del Cardinale, il giorno delle nozze, la Domenica delle Palme, un suicidio simulato (non confermato), la crocifissione del Dr. Stallman a Pasqua e i linciaggi natalizi di Debian, è sconcertante. Come si dice nei film polizieschi, segui i soldi.
L'ambiente digitale sottopone i parrocchiani alla sorveglianza di terze parti
La Chiesa cattolica è nata dalla persecuzione e bisogna ricordare che la sorveglianza è un pilastro della persecuzione.
Il fatto che i servizi più grandi, come Google, Facebook e Twitter, siano tutti apparentemente gratuiti è la prova che ricavano tutti i loro profitti dalla capacità di condurre un'efficace sorveglianza e manipolazione della popolazione.
Un tempo, la Chiesa svolgeva ruoli simili. I fedeli si sottoponevano a una forma di sorveglianza attraverso il sacramento della confessione, dove ricevevano consiglio dal loro sacerdote. I sacerdoti cercavano di esercitare una certa influenza dal pulpito, con la minaccia della scomunica e, di tanto in tanto, l'inquisizione o la persecuzione di qualcuno che era all'avanguardia, come Galileo.
Se le aziende tecnologiche riescono ad approssimare tutte queste funzioni in modo così efficace tramite algoritmi, corriamo il rischio che la religione diventi superflua.
Pertanto, cercare di svolgere il ruolo della Chiesa attraverso un mezzo che si sostituisce a quello della religione è molto simile a scavarsi la fossa con i propri occhi.
Attraverso una serie di inchieste pubbliche e di segnalazioni di informatori, abbiamo appreso fino a che punto questi padroni ci stiano privando della nostra dignità. Il loro obiettivo è anticipare ogni nostra decisione, influenzare le persone con cui parliamo, il nostro voto e ogni singolo centesimo del nostro bilancio.
Se ognuna di queste decisioni è controllata e perfino microgestita per noi, con precisione scientifica, fino all'ultimo centesimo sul nostro conto in banca ogni mese, dall'influenza di algoritmi, quale spazio rimane nella nostra coscienza per l'influenza del Vangelo?
Missione: rimanere rilevanti
Pertanto, la domanda posta al gruppo di lavoro sulla
missione nell'ambiente digitale
potrebbe essere riformulata come segue: in che modo la religione, di qualsiasi natura, continua a essere rilevante?
Oggi, per tradizione, in molte famiglie delle culture più ricche la chiesa è un luogo in cui si celebrano matrimoni, funerali e talvolta anche l'istruzione dei figli.
Affinché la chiesa possa dotare i propri parrocchiani di tecnologia, anziché perderli a causa della tecnologia, dobbiamo porci delle domande su alcuni degli argomenti sollevati dal movimento del software libero.
Come garantire che ogni persona abbia il pieno controllo sui propri dispositivi, incluso il diritto alla riparazione e il diritto di cambiare il sistema operativo.
Sviluppare strategie per proteggere le persone dai rischi della tecnologia. Ad esempio,
i social media che controllano il controllo sociale consentono a piccoli gruppi, ma molto rumorosi, di arrecare gravi danni alle proprie vittime attraverso la diffusione deliberata e ripetuta di pettegolezzi e diffamazione. Sta diventando sempre più difficile garantire che nessuna persona o minoranza venga esclusa dalle vendette online. Come fornire supporto alle persone prese di mira da questi individui tossici? Come garantire che ogni persona e gruppo possa parlare a turno?
Missione: proteggere la società dagli stessi errori
L'Australia ha avviato la procedura per l'istituzione di una Commissione Reale sugli abusi commessi da una vasta gamma di istituzioni, tra cui la Chiesa. Eppure, per molte persone decedute o che hanno perso familiari, salute e carriera, era troppo tardi. Non sarebbe opportuno intervenire con misure così incisive prima che si verifichino fallimenti catastrofici? È giunto il momento di rivolgere lo stesso livello di attenzione ai
dirigenti dei
media che controllano i social media e allo sfruttamento e alla manipolazione dell'opinione pubblica a più livelli.
Conclusione
I media di controllo sociale stanno rapidamente diventando una copertura per l'intelligenza artificiale. Come ci ha suggerito il test di Turing (il gioco dell'imitazione) fin dal 1949, è inevitabile che ogni nuova iterazione di questo fenomeno diventi sempre più indistinguibile dalla realtà. In quanto tale, potrebbe presentarsi non solo come un sostituto per i nostri simili, ma anche come un'alternativa alla Chiesa. Le persone potrebbero essere indotte ad accettarla come il loro Dio. In altre parole,
i media di controllo sociale potrebbero rendere la Chiesa irrilevante e, dopo averlo fatto, potrebbero continuare a rendere irrilevante l'umanità.
Basta guardare come mi fanno le smorfie dopo la morte di mio padre. La maleducazione che subisco quasi quotidianamente è iniziata in un momento di dolore. Le persone vengono plagiate a mettere da parte anche il più elementare rispetto per la dignità umana, il rispetto per la famiglia, in un momento di dolore, e questo diventa solo un'altra opportunità per strumentalizzare gli altri per divertimento. Questo aspetto della mia vita è stato interamente creato dai
social media
e dalle persone che stanno definendo quello spazio nella mia professione.
Nella sua testimonianza al Congresso, Frances Haugen ci ha detto:
Credo che ciò che ho fatto sia stato giusto e necessario per il bene comune, ma so che Facebook ha risorse infinite che potrebbe usare per distruggermi.
Nel 2018, ho partecipato al Forum delle Nazioni Unite su Imprese e Diritti Umani a Ginevra, dove ho rilasciato alcune brevi dichiarazioni sul fatto che Facebook e Twitter fossero finiti nelle mani sbagliate. Il Forum delle Nazioni Unite si è svolto contemporaneamente alla giuria che stava esaminando le accuse contro il Cardinale George Pell. Pell è stato condannato e queste
piattaforme
di controllo sociale si sono riempite di voci su di me e la mia famiglia, proprio quei fenomeni di cui la stessa Haugen sembra aver paura.
Ecco il video con i commenti che ho fatto al Forum delle Nazioni Unite. Ho parlato per appena quarantatré secondi e hanno speso 120.000 dollari per attaccare la mia famiglia.
Le regretté pape François a demandé à un groupe d'environ quatre cents évêques de travailler ensemble, de 2021 à 2024, à une réflexion sur la manière dont les fidèles
catholiques interagissent et progressent en tant que mouvement. Officiellement, ce comité d'évêques a reçu le titre de
Synode sur la synodalité . Le terme « Synode » est largement utilisé dans toutes les religions chrétiennes pour désigner les comités, conseils ou réunions de ces groupes, à tous les niveaux de la hiérarchie ecclésiale. Le terme
« Synodalité » est spécifique à l'Église catholique. Le Synode dispose d'une page web officielle où il
tente d'expliquer ce qu'est la synodalité .
Plusieurs groupes de travail ont été créés sur des sujets très variés. Dans cette analyse, je me concentre uniquement sur le troisième groupe, qui s'est penché sur la
mission dans l'environnement numérique . Je présente ensuite mes propres observations sur les sujets abordés par ce groupe.
Dans un récent article de presse, sans rapport avec le Synode, le diocèse de Paderborn (centre-nord de l'Allemagne)
a annoncé qu'il tenterait d'utiliser TikTok pour interagir avec les jeunes . Le champ d'action du groupe de travail 3 est très vaste et ne se limite pas aux
plateformes
de médias sociaux . Il me semble qu'il couvre toutes les formes de technologies numériques.
Même
les répéteurs de paquets
radioamateurs sont concernés, même si les licences de radioamateur n'autorisent pas la transmission explicite de matériel religieux.
Le Vatican a été l'un des premiers à adopter la radio à ondes courtes. Le pape Léon XIV et Mgr Lucio Adrian Ruiz, secrétaire du Dicastero per la Comunicazione, ont visité les installations de Radio Vatican cette semaine :
À la lecture des résultats du groupe de travail et du Synode dans son ensemble, j'ai le sentiment que l'Église dans son ensemble n'a pas décidé d'adopter ou de rejeter
les médias de contrôle social . Elle reconnaît qu'ils font partie du paysage numérique et tente de définir la manière dont l'Église s'y rapporte.
Comment le processus synodal a évolué à un niveau élevé
Avant d’entrer dans les détails, voici un aperçu du processus et des rapports parus à différents moments, avec des liens directs vers les éditions traduites.
Le site web principal du Synode est
www.Synod.va et il est disponible en plusieurs langues. Il semble que le contenu ait été rédigé en italien puis traduit en anglais et dans d'autres langues. Cela le rend un peu plus difficile à lire.
Une réunion élargie a eu lieu à Rome en octobre 2023, au cours de laquelle un premier projet de rapport a été élaboré.
Points clés du rapport final concernant l'environnement numérique
Au point 58, le rapport note que les chrétiens pourraient tenter de proclamer l’Évangile par leur participation à un environnement numérique.
58. ... Les chrétiens, chacun selon leurs divers rôles - au sein de la famille et des autres états de vie ; sur le lieu de travail et dans leur profession ; engagés civilement, politiquement, socialement ou écologiquement ; dans le développement d'une culture inspirée par l'Évangile, y compris l'évangélisation de l'environnement numérique - parcourent les chemins du monde et annoncent l'Évangile là où ils vivent, soutenus par les dons de l'Esprit.
59. Ce faisant, ils demandent à l’Église de ne pas les abandonner mais de leur permettre de se sentir envoyés et soutenus dans la mission.
Ce point semble encourager l’Église à réfléchir à la situation à laquelle sont confrontés ceux qui sont sous l’influence d’un environnement numérique, mais cela n’implique pas nécessairement que l’environnement numérique soit bon ou mauvais.
Au point 112, concernant la mobilité, qui inclut des personnes de tous les niveaux de la société, le rapport note :
Certains entretiennent des liens forts avec leur pays d’origine, notamment grâce aux médias numériques, et peuvent donc avoir du mal à nouer des liens dans leur nouveau pays ; d’autres se retrouvent à vivre sans racines.
C'est une excellente observation. En Europe, j'ai rencontré des couples dont la relation dépend entièrement des appareils de traduction automatique. Lorsque de nouveaux arrivants arrivent en ville, la culture WhatsApp encourage les voisins à passer des semaines, voire des mois, à discuter dans leur dos sans même les regarder dans les yeux.
113. La diffusion de la culture numérique, particulièrement visible chez les jeunes, transforme profondément leur perception de l'espace et du temps ; elle influence leurs activités quotidiennes, leur communication et leurs relations interpersonnelles, y compris la foi. Les opportunités offertes par Internet remodèlent les relations, les liens et les frontières. Aujourd'hui, nous ressentons souvent la solitude et la marginalisation, même si nous sommes plus connectés que jamais. De plus, ceux qui ont leurs propres intérêts économiques et politiques peuvent exploiter
les médias sociaux pour diffuser des idéologies et générer des formes de polarisation agressives et manipulatrices. Nous ne sommes pas bien préparés à cela et devons consacrer des ressources pour que l'environnement numérique devienne un espace prophétique de mission et d'annonce. Les Églises locales devraient encourager, soutenir et accompagner ceux qui s'engagent dans la mission dans l'environnement numérique. Les communautés et groupes chrétiens numériques, en particulier les jeunes, sont également appelés à réfléchir à la manière dont ils créent des liens d'appartenance, favorisant la rencontre et le dialogue. Ils doivent offrir une formation à leurs pairs, développant une manière synodale d'être Église. Internet, constitué comme un réseau de connexions, offre de nouvelles opportunités pour mieux vivre la dimension synodale de l’Église.
Ce paragraphe reconnaît les dangers du numérique, en particulier
des médias de contrôle social , et le mot clé est : « Nous ne sommes pas bien préparés à cela ». Il suggère néanmoins que les églises locales devraient « encourager » davantage ces risques en ligne. Je ne pense pas que le mot « encourager » soit le bon, mais je ne pense pas qu'elles devraient non plus décourager.
149. Le processus synodal a insisté sur certains aspects spécifiques de la formation du Peuple de Dieu à la synodalité. Le premier concerne l'impact de l'environnement numérique sur les processus d'apprentissage, la concentration, la perception de soi et du monde, et la construction des relations interpersonnelles. La culture numérique constitue une dimension cruciale du témoignage de l'Église dans la culture contemporaine et dans un champ missionnaire émergent. Cela exige de veiller à ce que le message chrétien soit présent en ligne de manière fiable, sans en déformer idéologiquement le contenu. Bien que les médias numériques aient un grand potentiel pour améliorer nos vies, ils peuvent aussi causer des préjudices et des blessures par le biais du harcèlement, de la désinformation, de l'exploitation sexuelle et des addictions. Les établissements d'enseignement de l'Église doivent aider les enfants et les adultes à développer des compétences essentielles pour naviguer en toute sécurité sur le web.
Ces commentaires sont très pertinents et très cohérents avec mon propre témoignage, dont une partie est reproduite plus loin dans ce rapport.
150. Un autre domaine de grande importance est la promotion dans tous les contextes ecclésiaux d’une culture de protection, faisant des communautés des lieux toujours plus sûrs pour les mineurs et les personnes vulnérables.
Lorsque j'ai évoqué ce sujet dans les communautés du logiciel libre, ma famille a été impitoyablement attaquée. Voir les
courriels que j'ai envoyés fin 2017 et les commentaires sur IBM
Red Hat plus loin dans ce rapport.
Sources liées au groupe de travail trois, la mission dans un environnement numérique
Le site web Synod.va a publié la liste de
tous les groupes de travail . Il comprend une courte vidéo sur chaque groupe et un lien vers leurs rapports les plus récents.
La vidéo du troisième groupe de travail dure un peu moins de deux minutes. Voici quelques citations clés et mes propres observations :
« Aujourd’hui, les gens, en particulier les jeunes, ont appris à vivre simultanément et de manière transparente dans des espaces numériques et physiques. »
Je pense que cette affirmation est totalement erronée. Les gens ont appris à utiliser les espaces numériques. Une étude récente suggère que
près de 70 % des jeunes se sentent mal après avoir utilisé les réseaux sociaux . Autrement dit, ils se sentent obligés de les utiliser. Par conséquent, leur vie est perturbée. Les gens souffrent.
Les déclarations faites dans la vidéo ne sont pas celles présentées dans le rapport final. Nous y reviendrons. Néanmoins, dès qu'il
est question
des médias de contrôle social , on a tendance à généraliser sur l'impossibilité de vivre sans eux. Chaque fois que nous voyons une telle affirmation, il est important de la remettre en question.
« Comment l’Église utilise-t-elle et s’approprie-t-elle la culture numérique ? »
La question rhétorique est intéressante. En réalité, les extrémistes de la Silicon Valley utilisent et s'approprient tout le contenu que nous leur fournissons. L'Église ne les utilise pas, elle nous utilise. Comment pensez-vous qu'ils sont devenus si riches ?
Une meilleure question pourrait être : « Comment l’Église
comble-t-elle les lacunes des cultures numériques ? ».
« Cet environnement est désormais « indiscernable de la sphère de la vie quotidienne ». »,
Le pape François était un homme intelligent, entouré de personnes brillantes, dont le regretté cardinal Pell. Cette citation trouve son origine dans la pensée d'Alan Turing. Turing est considéré comme le père de l'informatique et un martyr. Turing nous a transmis exactement le même concept avec le légendaire test de Turing, que Turing lui-même a appelé le « jeu de l'imitation » en 1949.
Une autre façon d’interpréter ce phénomène est de dire que les masses ont subi un lavage de cerveau de la part des seigneurs de la Silicon Valley.
Les choix des dirigeants de Facebook constituent un problème majeur – pour les enfants, la sécurité publique, la démocratie – et c'est pourquoi je me suis exprimé. Et soyons clairs : il n'est pas nécessaire qu'il en soit ainsi. Si nous sommes ici aujourd'hui, c'est grâce aux choix délibérés de Facebook.
Le résumé du groupe de travail continue...
« Pour proclamer efficacement l'Évangile dans notre culture contemporaine, nous devons discerner les opportunités et les défis présentés par cette nouvelle dimension du « lieu » »
Cette citation précise reconnaît qu'il existe à la fois des opportunités et des défis. L'année du jubilé est placée sous le signe de l'espoir et j'espère sincèrement que les membres du groupe de travail lisent les informations des lanceurs d'alerte, des psychologues pour enfants et
même des médecins légistes qui nous alertent sur l'impact de Facebook et de ses semblables .
Néanmoins, le rapport inclut l’expression « immersion plus grande » et j’estime que l’Église ne devrait pas supposer que « l’immersion plus grande » est une ligne de conduite par défaut.
Le résumé aborde également la notion de juridiction. L'Église catholique s'est traditionnellement organisée sur une base géographique. Internet permet aux individus de se connecter et de former des communautés virtuelles sans lien géographique.
Par ailleurs, avant l'avènement d'Internet, l'Église pouvait déplacer des prêtres à haut risque d'une paroisse d'un bout à l'autre de la ville sans craindre que quiconque ne les relie. J'ai examiné minutieusement les documents de la Commission royale australienne et suis tombé sur cette note du légendaire Père X___ :
Cela signifie que si quelqu'un en Australie, apprenant que le père Z___ a suivi un traitement à cause de quelque chose qui s'est passé à Boston et se rendant sur place pour le savoir, se retrouverait dans une impasse.
La lettre en question a été écrite juste avant qu'Internet ne devienne une réalité pour le grand public. Lire ces mots aujourd'hui nous rappelle brutalement à quel point Internet bouleverse notre quotidien.
Le groupe de travail poursuit en indiquant qu'il recherche des « recommandations ou propositions pratiques » de la part de toute la communauté, sur tout sujet lié à la mission de l'Église dans l'environnement numérique.
Les personnes engagées dans le mouvement du logiciel libre, qu’elles soient
catholiques ou non, peuvent contacter leur diocèse local pour savoir qui coordonne localement la réponse à ces défis.
Une autre phrase qui a attiré mon attention :
« Aujourd'hui, nous vivons dans une culture numérique »
Pas exactement. Certains diront qu'une culture numérique nous est imposée. Des institutions comme la politique et les médias s'y accrochent et la mettent sur un piédestal. Il est donc d'autant plus crucial que d'autres institutions, comme l'Église, se donnent pour mission de remettre en question l'ensemble de la culture numérique et de proposer des alternatives viables.
La vie sans téléphone portable, la vie sans applications
Téléphones mobiles et applications sont étroitement liés. Certains choisissent de vivre sans smartphone, c'est-à-dire qu'ils n'ont que la moitié des problèmes d'un téléphone portable classique. D'autres choisissent également d'utiliser un smartphone sans l'App Store de Google ou d'Apple, par exemple ceux qui installent
Replicant ou
LineageOS et utilisent l'
App Store de F-Droid pour limiter leur utilisation aux applications éthiques.
Concrètement, certaines personnes sont incapables de se déplacer dans leur ville sans utiliser leur téléphone. Une question intéressante se pose pour l'Église : quelle proportion de fidèles est incapable d'identifier le chemin le plus direct entre leur domicile et l'église la plus proche sans consulter une application ? Il serait intéressant d'analyser les réponses en fonction de divers facteurs tels que l'âge et le nombre d'années de résidence dans la paroisse.
Une autre question clé, étroitement liée à la précédente, est de savoir combien de paroissiens peuvent se souvenir des horaires de messe et des événements clés du calendrier paroissial sans consulter leur téléphone. C'est formidable que ces informations soient visibles sur le site web de la paroisse, mais lorsque les gens s'impliquent véritablement dans la paroisse et la communauté, elles resteront gravées dans leur mémoire. Plus ces informations sont diffusées dans une communauté, plus celle-ci est résiliente.
Les systèmes d’authentification portent atteinte à la dignité humaine
Aujourd’hui, nous voyons fréquemment des entreprises insister sur le fait qu’elles ont besoin de nos numéros de téléphone portable pour nous « authentifier » ou pour « signer » des documents par SMS.
Ce genre de chose est particulièrement inquiétant. Nombreux sont ceux qui connaissent la pratique nazie consistant à graver des numéros d'identification sur la peau des prisonniers juifs. Les numéros de téléphone portable ont une fonction similaire. Même s'ils ne sont pas gravés physiquement sur notre peau, il est souvent gênant de les changer.
Il existe de nombreux phénomènes étroitement liés, notamment des sites Web exigeant que les utilisateurs s’authentifient à partir d’un compte Gmail ou Facebook.
Au niveau de l’Église, de l’État, de l’éducation, des soins de santé et des services financiers, il est essentiel de garantir que chacun puisse participer comme il le souhaite sans renoncer à sa dignité.
L’Église doit s’exprimer sur ces sujets avec la même intensité que sur des thèmes tels que l’avortement.
Il faut mettre l’accent sur le consentement
Les préoccupations relatives au consentement et à la coercition sont devenues un sujet majeur dans le monde d'aujourd'hui. Ironiquement, les
plateformes
médiatiques de contrôle social qui prétendent donner une tribune aux femmes violent le principe du consentement de bien d'autres manières.
Prenons l'exemple de personnes qui ont créé un profil sur Facebook ou Twitter, parfois pendant des années, se connectant à des centaines, voire des milliers d'abonnés, et qui se voient ensuite demander d'ajouter leur numéro de téléphone portable à leur compte. S'ils ne le font pas, leur compte est bloqué. Il n'y a aucune raison technique valable d'avoir un numéro de téléphone portable sur son compte, car nombre de ces services fonctionnaient exactement de la même manière pendant de nombreuses années avant que ces demandes ne deviennent courantes.
Les gens ne consentent pas librement à partager leur numéro de téléphone avec Mark Zuckerberg et Elon Musk. Les services ont été altérés pour piéger leurs utilisateurs avec ces demandes.
Il est significatif que cette culture du piège et de la coercition se propage dans la société. En Australie, Chanel Contos a lancé une pétition/journal très médiatisé, rassemblant les témoignages de femmes scolarisées dans des écoles privées prestigieuses qui se sentaient victimes de pièges, de harcèlement et de violences physiques non désirées.
Ironiquement, Mme Contos a fait connaître ses inquiétudes sur les mêmes plateformes qui sapent notre compréhension du consentement et de la vie privée.
L'Église elle-même a dû se livrer à un examen de conscience approfondi sur les questions de consentement et d'abus de pouvoir. Cela la place dans une position intéressante : même au vu des révélations les plus choquantes sur les abus, les responsables constituent un moindre mal par rapport aux dirigeants de la Silicon Valley.
Il est remarquable de constater la rapidité avec laquelle les institutions de la Silicon Valley ont abandonné tout contrôle et tout équilibre pour n'agir qu'à leur guise. L'Église catholique et les autres institutions religieuses peuvent désormais tirer les leçons de l'analyse critique de leurs propres erreurs et mettre en garde la société contre la stupidité de s'engager à nouveau sur la même voie avec ces gangsters du numérique.
La technologie numérique est bien plus qu’un simple moyen de contrôle social
L'Église n'est pas novice en matière de technologie. Les premières presses à imprimer ont été installées dans les locaux de l'Église. Caxton a installé la première presse d'Angleterre à l'abbaye de Westminster. Parmi les autres sites figuraient Oxford et l'abbaye de Saint-Alban. Avant l'apparition de l'imprimerie, la lecture et l'écriture étaient réservées aux clercs et nombre de leurs ouvrages n'existaient qu'en latin. L'imprimerie a permis la production en masse de bibles en allemand et en anglais. Cela a eu un impact considérable sur la standardisation de la langue, tout comme elle a contribué à standardiser les attitudes morales que la Silicon Valley est en train de détruire. La version King James de la Bible est largement reconnue pour son influence sur la langue anglaise.
La standardisation de la langue n'était qu'un effet secondaire de cette invention. La Réforme en était un autre. À mesure que les gens acquéraient des livres et la faculté de lire, ils devenaient moins dépendants du clergé.
De même,
les médias de contrôle social influencent aujourd'hui notre culture, pour le meilleur et pour le pire. Tout comme l'imprimerie a permis la Réforme,
ces médias pourraient entraîner de nouveaux changements dans la manière dont les humains s'organisent autour des structures et des croyances religieuses. Les dirigeants de la Silicon Valley envisagent activement ces rôles. Elon Musk s'est même déguisé en Satan. Si l'Église catholique ne propose pas d'alternative convaincante à ces changements de pouvoir, elle sera dépossédée de ses pouvoirs.
Frances Haugen (lanceuse d'alerte Facebook) : Presque personne en dehors de Facebook ne sait ce qui se passe en interne. La direction de l'entreprise cache des informations vitales au public, au gouvernement américain, à ses actionnaires et aux gouvernements du monde entier. Les documents que j'ai fournis prouvent que Facebook nous a induits en erreur à plusieurs reprises sur ce que révèlent ses propres recherches concernant la sécurité des enfants, son rôle dans la diffusion de messages haineux et clivants, et bien d'autres choses encore.
Alors que les générations précédentes consultaient les religieux pour obtenir des conseils, puis lisaient la Bible, les jeunes d'aujourd'hui se tournent vers les moteurs de recherche et, demain, ils pourraient faire confiance à l'intelligence artificielle. Nous constatons déjà que les moteurs de recherche,
les médias sociaux et les robots d'intelligence artificielle incitent les gens à multiplier les conflits avec leurs voisins ou les conduisent sur les sentiers sombres de l'isolement, de l'automutilation et du suicide.
Ressources de l'Église catholique pertinentes pour l'environnement numérique
L'Église catholique joue un rôle important dans l'éducation et les écoles. Par conséquent, l'Église peut voir l'impact des
médias de contrôle social et l'Église peut imposer des interdictions aux enfants et fournir une formation au personnel et aux parents.
Les enseignants, qu'ils soient employés par l'Église ou l'État, ont signalé une augmentation du harcèlement de la part de parents qui se regroupent sur des applications de messagerie. Récemment,
la police britannique a envoyé six agents humilier un parent qui avait utilisé WhatsApp pour s'en prendre à l'école locale. Le conflit, le caractère conflictuel de cet environnement et l'énorme gaspillage de ressources policières sont autant de conséquences de la manière dont cette technologie est conçue et utilisée dans la société. Chaque incident de ce type donne un aperçu des occasions pour l'Église catholique de se demander « existe-t-il une meilleure solution ? ».
Les mots de Frances Haugen aident à expliquer les six policiers qui assiégent les parents de jeunes enfants :
J'ai constaté que Facebook se heurtait régulièrement à des conflits entre ses propres profits et notre sécurité. Facebook a systématiquement résolu ces conflits en faveur de ses propres profits. Il en résulte un système qui amplifie les divisions, l'extrémisme et la polarisation, et qui fragilise les sociétés du monde entier.
L'Église catholique est un employeur important dans de nombreux pays. Cela lui confère le pouvoir de décider de l'utilisation des téléphones portables et des applications de messagerie dans le cadre de la relation employeur-employé. Un employeur ne peut interdire à ses employés d'utiliser ces appareils pendant leur temps libre, mais il peut décider d'en supprimer toute utilisation officielle à des fins professionnelles. La relation employeur-employé offre une nouvelle occasion de sensibiliser les employés à l'importance de la dignité humaine, au-delà des exigences de nos appareils.
L'agenda public dans l'environnement numérique, l'avortement de notre espèce
Alors que de nombreux hommes politiques et journalistes vivent désormais au sein
des médias sociaux , leur capacité à évaluer les sujets dignes d'un débat public est fortement influencée par les sujets supposément tendance en ligne. On pense que ces sujets deviennent tendance en ligne grâce à l'intérêt général, alors qu'en réalité, les gestionnaires des plateformes en ligne exercent une influence pour que certains sujets semblent se développer naturellement, tandis que des sujets importants mais gênants sont commodément noyés dans le flot de l'actualité.
Dans ce contexte, l'Église catholique offre une voie alternative pour inscrire des questions à l'ordre du jour du débat public, qu'elles soient d'actualité ou non. Ce pouvoir est le plus souvent utilisé pour des questions proches de l'enseignement de l'Église, comme le lobbying sur l'avortement. Cependant, rien n'empêche l'Église d'utiliser les mêmes ressources pour lutter contre l'avortement de l'humanité par l'IA.
Aide aux victimes de discriminations de la part des seigneurs de la Silicon Valley et des mafias en ligne
L’Église catholique trouve ses origines dans la persécution de Jésus et des martyrs saint Pierre et saint Paul.
Mais laissons de côté les exemples anciens et venons-en à ceux qui, aux temps les plus proches de nous, ont lutté pour la foi. Prenons les nobles exemples de notre génération. Par jalousie et envie, les plus grands et les plus justes piliers de l'Église ont été persécutés et ont même été condamnés à mort. Plaçons devant nos yeux les bons apôtres. Pierre, par une envie injuste, a enduré non pas une ou deux, mais de nombreuses épreuves, et finalement, après avoir rendu son témoignage, il est parti pour la gloire qui lui était due. Par envie, Paul aussi a montré par l'exemple la récompense qui est donnée à la patience : sept fois il a été enchaîné ; il a été banni ; il a été lapidé ; devenu un héraut, tant en Orient qu'en Occident, il a acquis la noble renommée due à sa foi ; et après avoir prêché la justice au monde entier, et étant arrivé aux extrémités de l'Occident, et ayant rendu témoignage devant les dirigeants, il a finalement quitté le monde et est allé au lieu saint, étant devenu le plus grand exemple. de patience. » (première épître de Clément aux Corinthiens, 5:1 - 5:7)
Ces paroles expliquent la persécution de Pierre et Paul sous l’empereur Néron il y a près de deux mille ans.
Il y a huit cents ans, la Magna Carta est arrivée et, au fil du temps, elle a inspiré la Déclaration des droits des États-Unis, la Déclaration universelle des droits de l'homme et l'abolition de la peine capitale.
Et pourtant, aujourd’hui, nous voyons les seigneurs de la Silicon Valley vouloir tout jeter par la fenêtre et nous ramener à l’époque de Néron.
Toute personne a le droit de participer librement à la vie culturelle de la communauté, de jouir des arts et de participer au progrès scientifique et aux bienfaits qui en découlent.
Toute personne a droit à la protection des intérêts moraux et matériels découlant de toute production scientifique, littéraire ou artistique dont elle est l'auteur.
Lorsque nous consultons les sites web de projets de logiciels libres bien connus comme Debian et Fedora, nous les voyons proclamer ouvertement leur volonté de censurer certaines personnes. Quiconque s'exprime sur les questions éthiques dans notre secteur est parfois victime de représailles extrêmes.
Les similitudes entre ces cas et la liste croissante des victimes prouvent clairement qu'ils ne sont pas le fruit du hasard. Il existe une action coordonnée visant à restreindre ou à contourner les droits civiques. Si un espace ou un monde numérique existe, il ressemble étrangement à celui où les empereurs romains recouraient à des exécutions macabres pour perpétuer leur emprise par la peur.
L'Église catholique peut rechercher les victimes de l'annulation de leur publication, celles qui ont été déplateformées et celles qui ont leur mot à dire sur la dignité humaine à l'ère de l'IA. Que ces personnes soient
catholiques ou non, les préoccupations que des experts indépendants tentent d'étudier et de faire connaître doivent être mises en avant, au-delà du brouhaha des services de relations publiques.
Dans le même temps, l’impact horrible infligé à nos familles est souvent caché au public.
Les enfants dans l'environnement numérique
Il est révélateur que nous ayons trouvé des tactiques très similaires utilisées par Harvey Weinstein et Chris Lamb, ancien dirigeant du projet Debian.
C'est important, car Lamb a été formé grâce au Google Summer of Code et financé par Google, notamment par un important versement de 300 000 dollars peu avant que trois victimes ne révèlent le scandale. Malgré la promesse de transparence de Debian, l'argent n'a été révélé que
plus de six mois plus tard, et le nom de Google n'est jamais associé publiquement à ces chiffres.
Lorsque Weinstein s'inquiétait du comportement de certaines femmes, il envoyait de vilaines rumeurs à d'autres acteurs du milieu. Il y a quelque chose de snob dans ces attitudes envers le comportement humain.
Lorsque des femmes ont porté plainte auprès de la police, le réalisateur Peter Jackson a pris la parole et
a confirmé que Weinstein avait utilisé ces sales tours , répandant des rumeurs sur le comportement de femmes qui n'étaient pas assez soumises à son goût.
« Je me souviens que Miramax nous avait dit que travailler avec eux était un cauchemar et que nous devions les éviter à tout prix. C'était probablement en 1998 », a déclaré Jackson.
« À l'époque, nous n'avions aucune raison de remettre en question ce que ces gens nous disaient, mais avec le recul, je me rends compte qu'il s'agissait très probablement de la campagne de diffamation de Miramax en plein essor. »
Plusieurs personnes se sont manifestées, démontrant que Chris Lamb faisait exactement la même chose dans son rôle chez Debian. En vertu du droit d'auteur, les coauteurs n'ont aucune obligation envers la personne élue pour occuper ponctuellement le poste de chef de projet Debian. Nous sommes tous égaux.
Objet : Re : Statut de développeur Debian
Date : mar. 18 déc. 2018 10:36:09 +0900
De : Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>
À : Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro>
Bonjour Daniel,
même si subir un procès comme celui-ci au Royaume-Uni dépasse
mes capacités et mes possibilités financières,
j'ai peur que Lamb ait également refusé une candidature pour une
entreprise à New York, un emploi lié à Debian. Si cela s'est produit, et que je peux
raisonnablement le prouver, j'envisagerais une action en justice pour diffamation.
> Lamb réside au Royaume-Uni et envoie des e-mails depuis le Royaume-Uni
> https://regainyourname.com/news/cyberbullying-cyberstalking-and-online-harassment-a-uk-study/
Merci pour les liens, je les garderai à l'esprit.
Norbert
--
PREINING Norbert http://www.preining.info
Accelia Inc. + JAIST + TeX Live + Développeur Debian
GPG : 0x860CDC13 fp : F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0 ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13
Plus inquiétant encore, Lamb a commencé ses attaques contre ma famille au moment même où le cardinal George Pell a été condamné en 2018. Mon cousin au second degré était membre de l'ancienne chorale du cardinal George Pell à Melbourne. Lamb et ses complices, financés par Google, ont lancé des rumeurs anonymes d'abus.
Plusieurs personnes ont apporté des preuves montrant que Lamb se comportait comme Weinstein, répandant des rumeurs dans notre dos. Lorsque le Dr Preining et moi-même avons pris la parole, une troisième victime a eu vent du scandale et s'est identifiée publiquement le jour de Noël :
Objet : Re : Censure dans Debian
Date : mar. 25 déc. 2018 23:44:38 +0100
De : martin f krafft
Organisation : Le projet Debian
À : debian-project@lists.debian.org
Bonjour projet,
C’est très triste de lire ce qui se passe.
Je sais qu’il y a eu au moins un autre cas où DAM et AH
ont outrepassé leur mandat, menaçant d’
expulsion du projet et choisissant très sélectivement leurs interlocuteurs.
Je le sais, car j’étais ciblé.
Ni DAM ni AH (les mêmes personnes toujours actives aujourd’hui) n’ont
tenté une seule fois de m’entendre. Aucun de mes courriels à DAM ou à AH
n’a reçu de réponse.
Au lieu de cela, DAM a rendu un verdict et a influencé d’autres personnes au
point que « parce que DAM a statué » a été invoqué comme justification pour d’autres
mesures. Il s’agissait d’un abus de pouvoir inconstitutionnel de DAM, et dans
le cas d’AH, tout ce désordre frisait la diffamation. Entre autres,
l’actuel DPL, Chris Lamb, a promis une révision en temps voulu, mais
rien ne s’est jamais produit.
… [snip] …
Mais si cette technologie n’est pas sûre pour les ingénieurs qui la développent, elle n’est certainement pas sûre pour les enfants.
Le 5 octobre 2021, j'ai soulevé les inquiétudes concernant les enfants dans cette culture avec le rapport
Google, FSFE & Child Labor .
Red Hat , filiale d'IBM depuis 2019, a intenté une action en justice pour censurer et discréditer mes propos. Ils m'ont accusé de mauvaise foi pour avoir publié cet article. Pourtant, la commission d'enquête a jugé que
Red Hat me harcelait et abusait de la procédure administrative.
L'ironie, bien sûr, c'est que les cardinaux portent des casquettes rouges, comme le nom de l'entreprise
Red Hat qui a été accusée d'abus à mon égard. Chris Lamb, de Debian, avait lancé les rumeurs concernant ma famille lorsque le cardinal Pell a été condamné.
La manière dont cela a interféré avec nos vies et notre foi, les rumeurs d'abus après la condamnation du regretté cardinal Pell, ma visite aux carabiniers le jour de la mort du cardinal, le jour du mariage, le dimanche des Rameaux, qui a été un suicide par imitation (non confirmé), la crucifixion du Dr Stallman à Pâques et les lynchages de Noël de Debian, tout cela est stupéfiant. Comme on dit dans les films policiers, il faut suivre l'argent.
L'environnement numérique soumet les paroissiens à la surveillance de tiers
L’Église catholique est née de la persécution et il faut se rappeler que la surveillance est la pierre angulaire de la persécution.
Le fait que les plus grands services, comme Google, Facebook et Twitter, soient tous ostensiblement gratuits est la preuve qu’ils tirent tous leurs profits de leur capacité à surveiller et à manipuler efficacement la population.
Autrefois, l'Église remplissait des rôles similaires. Les fidèles se soumettaient à une forme de surveillance par le sacrement de la confession, où ils recevaient les conseils de leur prêtre. Les prêtres cherchaient à exercer une certaine influence depuis la chaire, menaçant l'excommunication et, de temps à autre, l'inquisition ou la persécution de personnes en avance sur leur temps, comme Galilée.
Si les entreprises technologiques peuvent approximer toutes ces fonctions de manière aussi efficace grâce à des algorithmes, nous courons le risque que la religion devienne redondante.
Par conséquent, tenter de jouer le rôle de l’Église à travers un média qui se substitue à celui de la religion revient à creuser sa propre tombe.
Grâce à une série d'enquêtes publiques et de lanceurs d'alerte, nous avons constaté à quel point ces seigneurs nous privent de notre dignité. Leur objectif est d'anticiper chacune de nos décisions, d'influencer nos interlocuteurs, nos votes et le moindre centime de notre budget.
Si chacune de ces décisions est contrôlée et même microgérée pour nous, avec une précision scientifique, jusqu’au dernier centime de notre compte bancaire chaque mois, par l’influence des algorithmes, quelle place reste-t-il dans notre conscience pour l’influence de l’Évangile ?
Mission : rester pertinent
Par conséquent, la question assignée au groupe de travail sur la
mission dans l’environnement numérique
pourrait être reformulée ainsi : comment la religion, quelle que soit sa nature, reste-t-elle pertinente ?
Pour de nombreuses familles des cultures aisées d’aujourd’hui, l’Église est engagée par tradition dans les mariages, les funérailles et parfois dans l’éducation des enfants.
Pour que l’Église puisse donner du pouvoir à ses paroissiens grâce à la technologie, plutôt que de les perdre à cause de la technologie, nous devons nous poser des questions sur certains des sujets soulevés par le mouvement du logiciel libre.
Comment garantir que chaque personne ait le contrôle total de ses appareils, y compris le droit de les réparer et le droit de modifier le système d’exploitation.
Élaborer des stratégies pour protéger les individus des risques liés à la technologie. Par exemple,
les médias de contrôle social permettent à des groupes restreints, mais très bruyants, de nuire gravement à leurs victimes par la diffusion délibérée et répétée de rumeurs et de diffamations. Il devient de plus en plus difficile de garantir qu'aucune personne ni minorité ne soit exclue par les vendettas en ligne. Comment apporter un soutien aux personnes ciblées par ces individus toxiques ? Comment garantir que chaque personne et chaque groupe puisse s'exprimer à son tour ?
Mission : protéger la société des mêmes erreurs
L'Australie a mis en place une commission royale d'enquête sur les abus commis par diverses institutions, dont l'Église. Pourtant, il était trop tard pour nombre de personnes décédées ou ayant perdu des proches, la santé ou leur carrière. Ne serait-il pas judicieux d'intervenir aussi vigoureusement avant plutôt qu'après des échecs catastrophiques ? Il est grand temps d'exercer le même contrôle sur
les dirigeants
des médias, qui exercent un contrôle social , ainsi que sur l'exploitation et la manipulation du public à de multiples niveaux.
Conclusion
Les médias de contrôle social deviennent rapidement une façade pour l'intelligence artificielle. Comme le test de Turing (jeu d'imitation) nous l'a suggéré depuis 1949, il est inévitable que chaque nouvelle itération de ce phénomène devienne de plus en plus indiscernable de la réalité. De ce fait, ils pourraient se présenter non seulement comme un substitut à nos semblables, mais aussi comme une alternative à l'Église. Les gens pourraient être dupés et l'accepter comme leur Dieu. Autrement dit,
les médias de contrôle social pourraient rendre l'Église insignifiante, et par la suite, rendre l'humanité insignifiante.
Il suffit de voir les grimaces des gens après la mort de mon père. L'impolitesse que je subis presque quotidiennement a commencé dans une période de deuil. On leur a inculqué le respect le plus élémentaire de la dignité humaine, le respect de la famille dans un moment de deuil, et cela devient une nouvelle occasion de se servir les uns des autres à des fins récréatives. Cet aspect de ma vie a été entièrement créé par
les médias sociaux
et ceux qui définissent cet espace dans ma propre profession.
Dans son témoignage devant le Congrès, Frances Haugen nous a dit :
Je crois que ce que j’ai fait était juste et nécessaire pour le bien commun, mais je sais que Facebook dispose de ressources infinies, qu’il pourrait utiliser pour me détruire.
En 2018, j'ai assisté au Forum des Nations Unies sur les entreprises et les droits de l'homme à Genève, où j'ai brièvement commenté la situation de Facebook et Twitter, tombés entre de mauvaises mains. Le Forum des Nations Unies s'est tenu au moment même où le jury examinait les accusations portées contre le cardinal George Pell. Pell a été condamné et ces
plateformes
de contrôle social se sont répandues dans les rumeurs concernant ma famille et moi, le phénomène même que Haugen elle-même semble redouter.
Voici la vidéo avec les commentaires que j'ai faits au Forum de l'ONU. J'ai parlé à peine quarante-trois secondes et ils ont dépensé 120 000 dollars pour attaquer ma famille.
El difunto Papa Francisco solicitó a un grupo de aproximadamente cuatrocientos obispos que trabajaran juntos, entre 2021 y 2024, en una revisión de cómo las personas de
fe católica interactúan y avanzan como movimiento. Formalmente, este comité de obispos recibió el nombre de
Sínodo sobre la Sinodalidad . El término Sínodo se usa ampliamente en todas las religiones cristianas para referirse a comités, juntas o reuniones de dichos grupos en cualquier nivel de la jerarquía eclesiástica. El término
sinodalidad es específico de la Iglesia católica. El Sínodo cuenta con una página web oficial donde
intenta explicar la sinodalidad .
Se crearon varios grupos de trabajo sobre una amplia gama de temas. En esta reseña, solo me centraré en el tercer grupo de trabajo, que examinó el tema de
la misión en el entorno digital . A continuación, presentaré mi propia evidencia sobre los temas que el grupo de trabajo está considerando.
En una noticia reciente no relacionada con el Sínodo, la diócesis de Paderborn (centro/norte de Alemania)
anunció que intentará usar TikTok para conectar con los jóvenes . El alcance del grupo de trabajo tres es muy amplio y no se limita a
las plataformas
de control social . Considero que abarca todas las formas de tecnología digital.
Incluso
los repetidores de paquetes
de radioaficionados están dentro del alcance, aunque las licencias de radioaficionado no permiten la transmisión explícita de material religioso.
El Vaticano fue pionero en la adopción de la radio de onda corta. El papa León XIV y monseñor Lucio Adrián Ruiz, secretario del Dicastero para la Comunicación, visitaron las instalaciones de Radio Vaticano esta semana:
Al leer los resultados tanto del grupo de trabajo como del Sínodo en general, considero que la iglesia en su conjunto no ha decidido si aceptar o rechazar
el control social de los medios . Reconocen que forman parte del panorama digital y tratan de definir cómo la iglesia se relaciona con él.
Cómo evolucionó el proceso sinodal a alto nivel
Antes de entrar en detalles, aquí presentamos una visión general del proceso y los informes que surgieron en diferentes momentos, con enlaces directos a las ediciones traducidas.
El sitio web principal del Sínodo es
www.Synod.va y está disponible en varios idiomas. Parece que el contenido fue creado en italiano y traducido al inglés y a otros idiomas. Esto dificulta un poco su lectura.
En octubre de 2023 se celebró una reunión ampliada en Roma donde se elaboró &ZeroWidthSpace&ZeroWidthSpaceun borrador inicial del informe.
Puntos clave del informe final en relación con el entorno digital
En el punto 58, el informe señala que los cristianos podrían estar intentando proclamar el Evangelio a través de su participación en un entorno digital.
58. ... los cristianos, cada uno según sus diversos roles —en la familia y en los otros estados de vida; en el lugar de trabajo y en la profesión; comprometidos civil, política, social o ecológicamente; en el desarrollo de una cultura inspirada en el Evangelio, incluida la evangelización del entorno digital— recorren los caminos del mundo y anuncian el Evangelio allí donde viven, sostenidos por los dones del Espíritu.
59. Al hacerlo, piden a la Iglesia que no los abandone, sino que les permita sentirse enviados y sostenidos en la misión.
Este punto parece animar a la Iglesia a contemplar la situación que enfrentan aquellos bajo la influencia de un entorno digital, pero no implica necesariamente que el entorno digital sea bueno o malo.
En el punto 112, relativo a la movilidad, que incluye a personas de todos los niveles de la sociedad, el informe señala:
Algunos mantienen fuertes vínculos con su país de origen, especialmente con la ayuda de los medios digitales, y por ello les puede resultar difícil establecer conexiones en su nuevo país; otros se encuentran viviendo sin raíces.
Esta es una excelente observación. En Europa, he conocido parejas cuyas relaciones dependen completamente de dispositivos que usan para la traducción automática. Cuando llega gente nueva a la ciudad, la cultura de WhatsApp anima a los vecinos a pasar semanas o meses hablando a sus espaldas sin siquiera mirarlos a los ojos.
113. La expansión de la cultura digital, especialmente evidente entre los jóvenes, está transformando profundamente su experiencia del espacio y el tiempo; influye en sus actividades cotidianas, su comunicación y sus relaciones interpersonales, incluida la fe. Las oportunidades que ofrece internet están transformando las relaciones, los vínculos y los límites. Hoy en día, a menudo experimentamos soledad y marginación, a pesar de estar más conectados que nunca. Además, quienes tienen sus propios intereses económicos y políticos pueden explotar
las redes sociales para difundir ideologías y generar formas agresivas y manipuladoras de polarización. No estamos bien preparados para esto y debemos dedicar recursos para garantizar que el entorno digital se convierta en un espacio profético para la misión y el anuncio. Las Iglesias locales deben animar, apoyar y acompañar a quienes participan en la misión en el entorno digital. Las comunidades y grupos digitales cristianos, en particular los jóvenes, también están llamados a reflexionar sobre cómo crear vínculos de pertenencia, promoviendo el encuentro y el diálogo. Necesitan ofrecer formación entre sus iguales, desarrollando una forma sinodal de ser Iglesia. Internet, constituido como una red de conexiones, ofrece nuevas oportunidades para vivir mejor la dimensión sinodal de la Iglesia.
Este párrafo reconoce los peligros de la tecnología digital, especialmente
los medios de control social , y la clave es "No estamos bien preparados para esto". Sin embargo, sugiere que las iglesias locales deberían fomentar más estos riesgos en línea. No creo que "fomentar" sea la palabra correcta, pero tampoco creo que deban desalentar.
149. El proceso sinodal ha llamado la atención con insistencia sobre algunas áreas específicas de la formación del Pueblo de Dios para la sinodalidad. La primera de ellas se refiere al impacto del entorno digital en los procesos de aprendizaje, la concentración, la percepción de uno mismo y del mundo, y la construcción de relaciones interpersonales. La cultura digital constituye una dimensión crucial del testimonio de la Iglesia en la cultura contemporánea y un campo misionero emergente. Esto exige garantizar que el mensaje cristiano esté presente en línea de forma fiable y sin distorsionar ideológicamente su contenido. Si bien los medios digitales tienen un gran potencial para mejorar nuestras vidas, también pueden causar daños y perjuicios a través del acoso, la desinformación, la explotación sexual y la adicción. Las instituciones educativas de la Iglesia deben ayudar a niños y adultos a desarrollar habilidades esenciales para navegar con seguridad en la web.
Estos comentarios son muy pertinentes y muy coherentes con mi propio testimonio, parte del cual se reproduce más adelante en este informe.
150. Otro ámbito de gran importancia es la promoción en todos los contextos eclesiales de una cultura de la salvaguardia, haciendo de las comunidades lugares cada vez más seguros para los menores y las personas vulnerables.
Fuentes relacionadas con el grupo de trabajo tres, la misión en un entorno digital
El sitio web Synod.va publicó una lista de
todos los grupos de trabajo . Incluye un breve video sobre cada grupo y un enlace a sus informes más recientes.
El video del grupo de trabajo tres dura poco menos de dos minutos. Aquí tienen algunas citas clave y mis propias observaciones:
Hoy en día, las personas, especialmente los jóvenes, han aprendido a vivir simultáneamente y sin interrupciones tanto en el espacio digital como en el físico.
Las afirmaciones del video no coinciden con las del informe final. Ya hablaremos de ello. Sin embargo, siempre que
se mencionan
los medios de control social , se tiende a generalizar sobre la imposibilidad de vivir sin ellos. Cada vez que vemos una afirmación como esta, es importante cuestionarla.
¿Cómo la Iglesia utiliza y se apropia de la cultura digital?
La pregunta retórica es interesante. En realidad, los superpoderes de Silicon Valley usan y se apropian de cualquier contenido que les damos. La iglesia no los usa a ellos, sino a nosotros. ¿Cómo crees que se enriquecieron tanto?
Una mejor pregunta podría ser: "¿cómo
complementa la iglesia las deficiencias de las culturas digitales?".
"Este entorno es ahora "indistinguible de la esfera de la vida cotidiana".
El papa Francisco era un hombre inteligente y contaba con personas inteligentes a su alrededor, incluido el difunto cardenal Pell. Podemos rastrear esta cita hasta el pensamiento de Alan Turing. Turing es considerado el abuelo de la informática y un mártir. Turing nos transmitió exactamente el mismo concepto en el legendario test de Turing, al que el propio Turing llamó el juego de imitación en 1949.
Otra forma de interpretar este fenómeno es decir que las masas han sido sometidas a un lavado de cerebro por los señores de Silicon Valley.
Las decisiones que están tomando los directivos de Facebook son un grave problema —para los niños, la seguridad pública y la democracia—. Por eso di un paso al frente. Y, seamos claros: no tiene por qué ser así. Estamos aquí hoy gracias a las decisiones deliberadas que Facebook ha tomado.
El resumen del grupo de trabajo continúa...
Para proclamar eficazmente el Evangelio en nuestra cultura contemporánea, debemos discernir las oportunidades y los desafíos que presenta esta nueva dimensión del “lugar”.
Esa cita en particular reconoce que existen tanto oportunidades como desafíos. El año del jubileo se centra en la esperanza y espero de verdad que los miembros del grupo de trabajo estén leyendo las advertencias de denunciantes, psicólogos infantiles e
incluso forenses sobre el impacto de Facebook y similares .
Sin embargo, el informe incluye la frase "mayor inmersión" y creo que la iglesia no debería asumir que una "mayor inmersión" es un curso de acción predeterminado.
El resumen también aborda el concepto de jurisdicción. La Iglesia Católica se ha organizado tradicionalmente sobre una base geográfica. Internet permite a las personas conectarse y formar comunidades virtuales sin ninguna conexión geográfica.
Por cierto, antes de internet, la Iglesia podía trasladar a sacerdotes de alto riesgo de una parroquia de un extremo a otro de la ciudad sin preocuparse de que alguien pudiera atar cabos. Revisé minuciosamente los documentos de la Comisión Real de Australia y encontré esta nota del legendario Padre X___:
Esto significa que si alguien en Australia se entera de que el Padre Z___ recibió tratamiento debido a algo que sucedió en Boston y va allí para averiguarlo, se encontrará en un callejón sin salida.
La carta en cuestión se escribió justo antes de que internet se popularizara. Al leer esas palabras hoy, nos recuerda claramente cómo internet está cambiando la vida.
El grupo de trabajo continúa comentando que están buscando "recomendaciones o propuestas prácticas" de toda la comunidad, sobre cualquier tema relacionado con la misión de la Iglesia en el entorno digital.
Las personas involucradas en el movimiento de software libre, sean
católicas o no, pueden comunicarse con su diócesis local para averiguar quién está coordinando localmente la respuesta a estos desafíos.
Otra frase que me llamó la atención:
"hoy vivimos en una cultura digital"
No exactamente. Algunos dirían que se nos está imponiendo una cultura digital. Instituciones como la política y los medios de comunicación están enganchadas a ella y la elevan a un pedestal. Por lo tanto, es aún más vital que otras instituciones, como la iglesia, asuman el rol de cuestionar todo lo relacionado con la cultura digital y también de mantener alternativas viables.
La vida sin móviles, la vida sin aplicaciones
Los teléfonos móviles y las aplicaciones están estrechamente relacionados. Hay quienes prefieren vivir sin un smartphone; es decir, solo tienen la mitad de los problemas que un teléfono móvil completo. También hay quienes prefieren tener smartphones sin la tienda de aplicaciones de Google o Apple; por ejemplo, quienes instalan
Replicant o
LineageOS y usan la
tienda de aplicaciones F-Droid para limitar su teléfono a aplicaciones éticas.
En la práctica, hay personas que no pueden desplazarse por su ciudad natal sin usar el teléfono. Surge una pregunta interesante para la iglesia: ¿qué proporción de fieles no puede identificar la ruta más directa desde su casa hasta la iglesia más cercana sin usar una aplicación? Sería interesante analizar las respuestas en función de diversos factores, como la edad y los años de residencia en la parroquia.
Otra pregunta clave, estrechamente relacionada con la anterior, es cuántos feligreses pueden recordar los horarios de misa y los eventos clave del calendario parroquial sin mirar su teléfono. Es excelente tener esta información visible en el sitio web de la parroquia; sin embargo, cuando las personas participan activamente en la parroquia y la comunidad, esta información se memoriza. Cuanto más presente sea esta información en una comunidad, más resiliente será.
Sistemas de autenticación que socavan la dignidad humana
Hoy en día vemos con frecuencia empresas que insisten en que necesitan nuestros números de teléfono móvil para “autenticarnos” o para “firmar” documentos por mensaje de texto.
Este tipo de cosas es particularmente escalofriante. Mucha gente conoce la práctica de la época nazi de grabar los números de identificación en la piel de los prisioneros judíos. Los números de teléfono móvil tienen una función similar. Aunque no se graban físicamente en la piel, suele ser incómodo cambiarlos.
Hay muchos fenómenos estrechamente relacionados, incluidos sitios web que exigen que los usuarios se autentiquen desde una cuenta de Gmail o Facebook.
A nivel de la Iglesia, el Estado, la educación, la atención sanitaria y los servicios financieros, es vital garantizar que todos puedan participar como quieran sin renunciar a su dignidad.
La iglesia necesita hablar sobre estos temas con la misma vehemencia con la que habla sobre temas como el aborto.
Es necesario enfatizar el consentimiento
La preocupación por el consentimiento y la coerción se ha convertido en un tema de gran importancia en el mundo actual. Irónicamente, las
plataformas
de control social que pretenden dar voz a las mujeres están violando el principio del consentimiento de muchas otras maneras.
Pensemos, por ejemplo, en las personas que dedicaron tiempo a crear un perfil en Facebook o Twitter, a veces durante muchos años, conectando con cientos o miles de seguidores y luego se encontraron con la exigencia de añadir su número de teléfono móvil a su cuenta. Si no lo hacían, su cuenta era bloqueada. No existe una razón técnica válida para tener un número de teléfono móvil en la cuenta, ya que muchos de estos servicios funcionaron exactamente igual durante muchos años antes de que tales exigencias se volvieran comunes.
Las personas no consienten libremente compartir sus números de teléfono con Mark Zuckerberg y Elon Musk. Los servicios han sido corrompidos para engañar a sus usuarios con estas exigencias.
Es significativo que esta cultura de emboscar y coaccionar a las personas se haya extendido a la sociedad. En Australia, Chanel Contos inició una petición/diario muy publicitada con historias de mujeres de escuelas privadas de élite que se sintieron emboscadas, intimidadas y obligadas a tener encuentros físicos no deseados.
Irónicamente, la señorita Contos hizo públicas sus preocupaciones a través de las mismas plataformas que están socavando nuestra comprensión del consentimiento y la privacidad.
La propia iglesia ha tenido que hacer un profundo examen de conciencia sobre temas de consentimiento y abuso de poder. Esto la coloca en una posición interesante, donde podemos afirmar que, incluso considerando algunas de las revelaciones más impactantes sobre el abuso, los responsables son el mal menor en comparación con los amos de Silicon Valley.
Es notable la rapidez con la que las instituciones de Silicon Valley han abandonado todos los controles y contrapesos, y han optado por hacer lo que les place. La Iglesia Católica y otras instituciones religiosas ahora pueden aprovechar lo aprendido del análisis crítico de sus propios errores y advertir a la sociedad sobre la estupidez que sería repetir el mismo camino con estos gánsteres digitales.
La tecnología digital es mucho más que medios de control social
La iglesia no es ajena a la tecnología. Las primeras imprentas se instalaron en los templos. Caxton instaló la primera imprenta de Inglaterra en la Abadía de Westminster. Otros lugares fueron Oxford y la Abadía de St. Alban. Antes de la imprenta, leer y escribir eran actividades reservadas a los clérigos, y muchas de sus obras solo existían en latín. La imprenta permitió la producción masiva de biblias en alemán e inglés. Esto, a su vez, tuvo un gran impacto en la estandarización del idioma, así como en la estandarización de las actitudes morales que Silicon Valley está destruyendo. La versión King James de la Biblia es ampliamente reconocida por su impacto en el idioma inglés.
La estandarización del lenguaje fue solo un efecto secundario de esta invención. La reforma fue otro. A medida que la gente adquirió libros y el poder de la lectura, se volvió menos dependiente del clero.
De igual manera,
los medios de control social actuales están impactando nuestra cultura, para bien o para mal. Así como la imprenta facilitó la reforma,
los medios de control social podrían conducir a nuevos cambios en la forma en que los humanos nos organizamos en torno a las estructuras y creencias religiosas. Los amos de Silicon Valley están considerando activamente estos roles para sí mismos. Elon Musk incluso se ha disfrazado de Satanás. Si la Iglesia Católica no ofrece una alternativa convincente a estos cambios de poder, se la arrebatarán.
Frances Haugen (denunciante de Facebook): Casi nadie fuera de Facebook sabe lo que ocurre dentro de Facebook. La dirección de la compañía oculta información vital al público, al gobierno de Estados Unidos, a sus accionistas y a gobiernos de todo el mundo. Los documentos que he proporcionado demuestran que Facebook nos ha engañado repetidamente sobre lo que revela su propia investigación sobre la seguridad infantil, su papel en la difusión de mensajes de odio y polarización, y mucho más.
Mientras que las generaciones anteriores recurrían a clérigos en busca de consejo, y luego leían la Biblia, los jóvenes de hoy recurren a un motor de búsqueda, y mañana podrían depositar su fe en la inteligencia artificial. Ya podemos ver evidencia de que los motores de búsqueda,
las redes sociales de control y los bots de IA conducen a las personas a mayores niveles de conflicto con sus vecinos o las llevan por caminos oscuros de aislamiento, autolesión y suicidio.
Recursos de la Iglesia Católica relevantes para el entorno digital
La Iglesia Católica tiene un papel importante en la educación y las escuelas, por lo tanto, la Iglesia puede ver el impacto de
los medios de control social y puede imponer prohibiciones a los niños y brindar capacitación al personal y a los padres.
Los docentes, tanto empleados de la Iglesia como del Estado, han reportado un aumento del acoso escolar por parte de padres que se agrupan en aplicaciones de mensajería. En un caso reciente,
la policía británica envió a seis agentes para humillar a un padre que había usado WhatsApp para protestar contra la escuela local. El conflicto, la naturaleza conflictiva de este entorno y el enorme desperdicio de recursos policiales son consecuencias de la forma en que se diseña y utiliza la tecnología en la sociedad. Cada incidente como este ofrece una perspectiva sobre las oportunidades que tiene la Iglesia Católica para preguntarse: "¿Hay una mejor manera?".
Las palabras de Frances Haugen ayudan a explicar por qué seis policías sitiaron a los padres de niños pequeños:
Vi que Facebook se enfrentaba repetidamente a conflictos entre sus propios beneficios y nuestra seguridad. Facebook siempre resolvía esos conflictos a favor de sus propios beneficios. El resultado ha sido un sistema que amplifica la división, el extremismo y la polarización, y que debilita a las sociedades de todo el mundo.
La Iglesia Católica es un importante empleador en muchos países. Esto le otorga la capacidad de tomar decisiones sobre el uso de teléfonos móviles y aplicaciones de mensajería en la relación empleador-empleado. Un empleador no puede prohibir a sus empleados el uso de estos dispositivos en su tiempo libre, pero sí puede decidir eliminar cualquier uso oficial de estos recursos con fines laborales. La relación empleador-empleado ofrece otra oportunidad para capacitar sobre la importancia de la dignidad humana por encima de las exigencias de nuestros dispositivos.
La agenda pública en el entorno digital, el aborto de nuestra especie
Dado que muchos políticos y periodistas viven ahora a través de
medios de control social , su capacidad para evaluar qué temas merecen debate público se ve fuertemente influenciada por los que supuestamente son tendencia en línea. Existe la idea de que los temas son tendencia en línea debido al interés público, mientras que la realidad es que los administradores de las plataformas en línea ejercen influencia para asegurar que algunos temas parezcan crecer orgánicamente, mientras que temas importantes pero inconvenientes quedan convenientemente ocultos en el torrente de noticias.
En este contexto, la Iglesia Católica ofrece una vía alternativa para incluir temas en la agenda de debate público, independientemente de si un tema en particular parece ser tendencia o no. Este poder se utiliza con mayor frecuencia para temas relacionados con la doctrina de la Iglesia, como el cabildeo sobre el aborto, pero no hay razón para que la Iglesia no pueda utilizar los mismos recursos para presionar contra el aborto de la raza humana mediante IA.
Ayuda a las víctimas de discriminación por parte de los señores de Silicon Valley y las turbas en línea
La Iglesia Católica remonta sus orígenes a la persecución de Jesús y los mártires San Pedro y San Pablo.
Pero dejemos de lado los ejemplos antiguos y vayamos a quienes, en tiempos más cercanos a nosotros, lucharon por la fe. Tomemos los nobles ejemplos de nuestra generación. Por celos y envidia, los pilares más grandes y justos de la Iglesia fueron perseguidos, llegando incluso a la muerte. Consideremos a los buenos apóstoles. Pedro, por envidia injusta, soportó no uno ni dos, sino muchos trabajos, y finalmente, tras dar su testimonio, partió al lugar de gloria que le correspondía. Por envidia, Pablo también mostró con su ejemplo el premio que se otorga a la paciencia: siete veces fue encadenado, desterrado y apedreado. Habiéndose convertido en heraldo, tanto en Oriente como en Occidente, obtuvo el noble renombre debido a su fe; y habiendo predicado la justicia al mundo entero, y habiendo llegado a los confines de Occidente, y habiendo dado testimonio ante gobernantes, finalmente partió del mundo y fue al lugar santo, convirtiéndose en el mayor ejemplo. de paciencia." (Primera epístola de Clemente a los Corintios, 5:1 - 5:7)
Estas palabras describen la persecución de Pedro y Pablo bajo el emperador Nerón hace casi dos mil años.
Hace ochocientos años llegó la Carta Magna y, con el tiempo, ha inspirado la Carta de Derechos de Estados Unidos, la Declaración Universal de Derechos Humanos y la abolición de la pena capital.
Sin embargo, hoy vemos que los señores de Silicon Valley quieren tirar todo eso por la ventana y llevarnos de nuevo a la época de Nerón.
Toda persona tiene derecho a tomar parte libremente en la vida cultural de la comunidad, a gozar de las artes y a participar del progreso científico y de sus beneficios.
Toda persona tiene derecho a la protección de los intereses morales y materiales que le correspondan por razón de las producciones científicas, literarias o artísticas de que sea autora.
Al consultar los sitios web de proyectos de software libre conocidos como Debian y Fedora, vemos que proclaman abiertamente su deseo de censurar a ciertas personas. Cualquiera que se pronuncie sobre cuestiones éticas en nuestra industria ha sido objeto de estas extremas represalias ocasionalmente.
Las similitudes entre estos casos y la creciente lista de víctimas son prueba clara de que no son aleatorios. Existe un esfuerzo coordinado para reducir o eludir los derechos civiles. Si existe un espacio o un mundo digital, es inquietantemente similar al mundo donde los emperadores romanos recurrían a ejecuciones espantosas para perpetuar el control mediante el miedo.
La Iglesia Católica puede buscar a las víctimas que han sido canceladas, a las víctimas que han sido expulsadas de sus plataformas y a quienes tienen algo que decir sobre la dignidad humana en la era de la IA. Sean o
no católicas , las preocupaciones que expertos independientes han estado intentando investigar y difundir deben ser puestas por encima del ruido de los departamentos de relaciones públicas.
Al mismo tiempo, el terrible impacto infligido a nuestras familias a menudo queda oculto a la vista del público.
Los niños en el entorno digital
Es revelador que hayamos encontrado tácticas muy similares utilizadas por Harvey Weinstein y Chris Lamb, ex líder del Proyecto Debian.
Esto es significativo porque Lamb se formó a través del Google Summer of Code y recibió financiación de Google, incluyendo un cuantioso pago de 300.000 dólares poco antes de que tres víctimas revelaran el escándalo. A pesar de la promesa de transparencia de Debian, el dinero no se reveló
hasta seis meses después y el nombre de Google nunca se ha relacionado públicamente con las cifras.
Cuando a Weinstein le preocupaba el comportamiento de algunas mujeres, difundía rumores desagradables sobre su "comportamiento" a otras personas de la industria. Hay algo de esnobismo en estas actitudes hacia el comportamiento humano.
Cuando las mujeres presentaron denuncias a la policía, el director de cine Peter Jackson habló y
confirmó que Weinstein había estado usando estos trucos sucios , difundiendo rumores sobre el comportamiento de las mujeres que no eran lo suficientemente sumisas para su gusto.
"Recuerdo que Miramax nos dijo que era una pesadilla trabajar con ellos y que debíamos evitarlos a toda costa. Esto fue probablemente en 1998", dijo Jackson.
En ese momento, no teníamos motivos para cuestionar lo que nos decían, pero en retrospectiva, me doy cuenta de que es muy probable que se tratara de la campaña de desprestigio de Miramax en pleno apogeo.
Diversas personas han dado a conocer que Chris Lamb hacía exactamente lo mismo en su puesto en Debian. Según la ley de derechos de autor, los coautores no tienen ninguna obligación con la persona elegida para servir como Líder del Proyecto Debian en cada momento. Todos somos iguales.
Asunto: Re: Estado del desarrollador de Debian
Fecha: mar., 18 dic. 2018 10:36:09 +0900
De: Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>
Para: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro>
Hola, Daniel,
Incluso si, pasar por una demanda como esta en el Reino Unido es algo fuera de lo común.
Mis capacidades y posibilidades financieras.
Pero me temo que Lamb en realidad también arruinó una solicitud para un
empresa en Nueva York, un trabajo relacionado con Debian. Si eso ha sucedido, y puedo...
Si lo documentara razonablemente, consideraría una demanda por difamación.
> Lamb reside en el Reino Unido y envía correos electrónicos desde el Reino Unido.
> https://regainyourname.com/news/ciberbullying-ciberacecho-y-acoso-en-linea-un-estudio-del-Reino-Unido/
Gracias por los enlaces, los tendré en cuenta.
Norberto
--
PREINING Norbert http://www.preining.info
Accelia Inc. + JAIST + TeX Live + Desarrollador Debian
GPG: 0x860CDC13 fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0 ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13
Aún más inquietante, Lamb comenzó sus ataques contra mi familia justo cuando el cardenal George Pell fue condenado en 2018. Mi primo segundo había sido miembro del antiguo coro del cardenal George Pell en Melbourne. Lamb y sus cómplices, financiados por Google, difundieron rumores anónimos sobre abusos.
Varias personas presentaron pruebas de que Lamb se comportaba como Weinstein, difundiendo rumores a nuestras espaldas. Cuando el Dr. Preining y yo hablamos, una tercera víctima vio el escándalo y se identificó públicamente el día de Navidad:
Asunto: Re: Censura en Debian
Fecha: mar., 25 dic. 2018 23:44:38 +0100
De: martin f. krafft
Organización: El proyecto Debian
Para: debian-project@lists.debian.org
Hola proyecto,
Es muy triste leer lo que está pasando.
Sé que ha habido al menos otro caso, en el que DAM y AH
Han actuado fuera de su mandato, amenazando con proyectos
expulsión y elegir de forma muy selectiva con quién comunicarse.
Lo sé, porque me estaban tomando como blanco.
Ni DAM ni AH (las mismas personas que siguen activas hoy en día) hicieron...
Un solo intento de escucharme. Ninguno de mis correos electrónicos a DAM ni a AH
fueron respondidas alguna vez.
En cambio, DAM dictó un veredicto e influyó en otras personas para que...
punto de que "porque DAM gobernaba" se dio como razón para otros
medidas. Esto fue un abuso inconstitucional de los poderes de DAM, y en
En el caso de AH, todo el embrollo también rozaba la difamación. Entre otros,
El actual DPL Chris Lamb prometió una revisión a su debido tiempo, pero
Nunca pasó nada.
... [ recorte ] ...
Pero si no es seguro para los ingenieros que crean esta tecnología, ciertamente no es seguro para los niños.
Red Hat , subsidiaria de IBM desde 2019, inició acciones legales para censurar y desacreditar mis preocupaciones. Me acusaron de mala fe por publicar ese artículo. Sin embargo, el panel legal dictaminó que
Red Hat me estaba acosando y que había abusado del procedimiento administrativo.
La ironía, claro, es que los Cardenales llevan sombreros rojos, como el nombre de la empresa
Red Hat , que fue descubierta abusando de mí. Chris Lamb, de Debian, fue quien inició los rumores sobre mi familia cuando el Cardenal Pell fue condenado.
La forma en que esto se entrelazó con nuestras vidas y nuestra fe, los rumores de abuso tras la condena del difunto cardenal Pell, mi visita a los Carabineros el día de la muerte del cardenal, el día de la boda, el Domingo de Ramos, siendo un suicidio imitador (sin confirmar), la crucifixión del Dr. Stallman en Pascua y los linchamientos navideños de Debian, es asombroso. Como dicen en las películas de crímenes, sigue el dinero.
El entorno digital somete a los feligreses a la vigilancia de terceros
La Iglesia Católica nació de la persecución y hay que recordar que la vigilancia es una piedra angular de la persecución.
El hecho de que los servicios más grandes, como Google, Facebook y Twitter, sean aparentemente gratuitos es una prueba de que obtienen todos sus beneficios de su capacidad de ejercer una vigilancia y manipulación eficaces de la población.
En una época, la Iglesia cumplía funciones similares. Los fieles se sometían a una forma de vigilancia mediante el sacramento de la confesión, donde recibían consejo de su sacerdote. Los sacerdotes buscaban ejercer cierta influencia desde el púlpito, con la amenaza de excomunión y, de vez en cuando, la inquisición o persecución de algún adelantado a su tiempo, como Galileo.
Si las empresas tecnológicas pueden aproximar todas estas funciones tan efectivamente con algoritmos, corremos el riesgo de que la religión se vuelva redundante.
Por lo tanto, intentar desempeñar el papel de la Iglesia a través de un medio que sustituye el papel de la religión es muy parecido a cavar la propia tumba.
A través de una serie de investigaciones públicas y denuncias, hemos escuchado hasta qué punto estos señores están despojando nuestra dignidad. Su objetivo es anticipar cada una de nuestras decisiones, influir en con quién hablamos, en cómo votamos y hasta el último centavo de nuestro presupuesto.
Si cada una de esas decisiones es controlada e incluso microgestionada por nosotros, con precisión científica, hasta el último centavo de nuestra cuenta bancaria cada mes, por la influencia de algoritmos, ¿qué espacio queda en nuestra conciencia para la influencia del Evangelio?
Misión: seguir siendo relevante
Por lo tanto, la pregunta asignada al grupo de trabajo sobre la
misión en el entorno digital
podría reformularse así: ¿cómo puede la religión, sea cual sea su naturaleza, seguir siendo relevante?
Hoy en día, para muchas familias de culturas adineradas, la iglesia participa, por tradición, en la celebración de bodas, funerales y, a veces, en la educación de los niños.
Para que la iglesia pueda empoderar a los feligreses con la tecnología, en lugar de perderlos a causa de la tecnología, necesitamos hacer preguntas sobre algunos de los temas planteados por el movimiento del software libre.
Cómo garantizar que cada persona tenga control total sobre sus dispositivos, incluido el derecho a repararlos y a cambiar el sistema operativo.
Desarrollar estrategias para proteger a las personas de los riesgos de la tecnología. Por ejemplo,
las redes sociales de control permiten que grupos pequeños pero muy ruidosos causen un daño intenso a sus víctimas mediante la difusión deliberada y repetida de chismes y difamaciones. Cada vez es más difícil garantizar que ninguna persona o minoría sea excluida por las venganzas en línea. ¿Cómo brindar apoyo a las personas que son blanco de estas personas tóxicas? ¿Cómo garantizar que cada persona y grupo pueda expresarse?
Misión: proteger a la sociedad de los mismos errores
Australia pasó por el proceso de crear una Comisión Real para investigar los abusos cometidos por diversas instituciones, incluida la Iglesia. Sin embargo, fue demasiado tarde para muchas de las personas que fallecieron o perdieron a sus familiares, su salud y sus carreras. ¿No sería fantástico realizar intervenciones tan contundentes antes, y no después, de los catastróficos fracasos? Ya es hora de que se aplique el mismo nivel de escrutinio a
los jefes
de los medios de comunicación que controlan las redes sociales y a la explotación y manipulación del público en múltiples niveles.
Conclusión
Los medios de control social se están convirtiendo rápidamente en una fachada para la inteligencia artificial. Como nos ha sugerido la prueba de Turing (juego de imitación) desde 1949, es inevitable que cada nueva iteración de este fenómeno se vuelva cada vez más indistinguible de la realidad. Por ello, podría presentarse no solo como un sustituto de los demás seres humanos, sino como una alternativa a la iglesia. La gente podría ser engañada para aceptarla como su dios. En otras palabras,
los medios de control social podrían volver irrelevante a la iglesia y, después de eso, podrían continuar haciendo irrelevante a la humanidad.
Solo mira cómo me hacen muecas tras la muerte de mi padre. La grosería que sufro casi a diario empezó en un momento de duelo. A la gente se le inculca que deje de lado incluso el respeto más básico por la dignidad humana, el respeto por la familia en momentos de duelo, y se convierte en otra oportunidad para usarnos mutuamente como pasatiempo. Este aspecto de mi vida fue creado enteramente por
los medios de control social
y las personas que definen ese espacio en mi propia profesión.
En su testimonio ante el Congreso, Frances Haugen nos dijo:
Creo que lo que hice fue correcto y necesario para el bien común, pero sé que Facebook tiene recursos infinitos que podría usar para destruirme.
En 2018, asistí al Foro de la ONU sobre Empresas y Derechos Humanos en Ginebra, donde hice algunos breves comentarios sobre la posibilidad de que Facebook y Twitter cayeran en malas manos. El Foro de la ONU coincidió con la consideración de los cargos contra el cardenal George Pell por parte del jurado. Pell fue condenado y estas
plataformas
de control social se llenaron de rumores sobre mi familia y sobre mí, el mismo fenómeno al que la propia Haugen parece temer.
Aquí está el video con los comentarios que hice en el Foro de la ONU. Hablé apenas cuarenta y tres segundos y gastaron 120.000 dólares en atacar a mi familia.
The late Pope Francis asked a group of approximately four hundred
bishops to work together from 2021 to 2024 on a review of how people of
Catholic faith interact and advance as a movement. In formal
terms, this committee of bishops was given the title
Synod on Synodality. The term Synod is used widely
in all Christian religions to refer to committees, boards or meetings of
those groups at any level of the church heirarchy. The term
Synodality is specific to the Catholic Church. The Synod has
an official web page where they
attempt to explain Synodality.
Various working groups were created on a wide range of topics. In this
review, I am only looking at working group three, which examined the topic
the mission in the digital environment. I then go on to
provide some of my own evidence about the topics the working group
is considering.
Even
amateur radio packet repeaters are in scope although
amateur radio licensing doesn't allow the explicit transmission of
religious material.
The Vatican was an early adopter of shortwave radio. Pope Leo XIV and
Monsignor Lucio Adrian Ruiz, secretary of the Dicastero per la Comunicazione
visited Vatican Radio's broadcasting facility this week:
Reading the outputs from both the working group and the overall
Synod, I feel that the church as a whole did not decide to either
embrace or reject
social control media. They are acknowledging
that it is part of the digital landscape and trying to decide how
the church relates to it.
How the Synod process evolved at a high level
Before delving into the details, here is an overview of
the process and the reports that came out at different times,
with direct links to the translated editions.
The main web site for the Synod is at
www.Synod.va and it is available
in various languages. It appears that the content was created in
Italian and translated to English and other languages. This makes
it a little bit more difficult to read.
There was an extended gathering in Rome in October 2023 where
an initial draft report was produced.
Key points from the final report as it relates to the digital environment
At point 58, the report notes that Christians may be attempting to
proclaim the Gospel through their participation in a digital environment.
58. ... Christians, each according to their diverse roles - within the family and
other states of life; in the workplace and in their professions; engaged civilly, politically,
socially or ecologically; in the development of a culture inspired by the Gospel, including the
evangelisation of the digital environment - walk the paths of the world and proclaim the Gospel
where they live, sustained by the gifts of the Spirit.
59. In doing so, they ask the Church not to abandon them but rather to enable them to feel
that they are sent and sustained in mission.
This point appears to encourage the church to contemplate the situation
faced by those under the influence of a digital environment but it does not
necessarily imply the digital environment is good or bad.
At point 112, concerning mobility, which includes people from all levels
of society, the report notes:
Some maintain strong bonds with their country of origin, especially with
the help of digital media, and thus can find it difficult to form connections
in their new country; others find themselves living without roots.
This is an excellent observation. In Europe, I've met couples who
have relationships entirely dependent upon devices they use for
automated machine translation. When new people arrive in town, the
WhatsApp culture encourages neighbors to spend weeks or months talking
behind their backs without ever looking them in the eye.
113. The spread of digital culture, particularly evident among young people, is profoundly
changing their experience of space and time; it influences their daily activities, communication
and interpersonal relationships, including faith. The opportunities that the internet provides are
reshaping relationships, bonds and boundaries. Nowadays, we often experience loneliness and
marginalisation, even though we are more connected than ever. Moreover, those with their own
economic and political interests can exploit
social media to spread ideologies and generate
aggressive and manipulative forms of polarisation. We are not well prepared for this and ought
to dedicate resources to ensure that the digital environment becomes a prophetic space for
mission and proclamation. Local Churches should encourage, sustain and accompany those
who are engaged in mission in the digital environment. Christian digital communities and
groups, particularly young people, are also called to reflect on how they create bonds of
belonging, promoting encounter and dialogue. They need to offer formation among their peers,
developing a synodal way of being Church. The internet, constituted as a web of connections,
offers new opportunities to better live the synodal dimension of the Church.
This paragraph acknowledges the dangers of digital technology, especially
social control media and the key words are
"We are not well prepared for this". Yet it suggests that local churches
should "encourage" more of these online risks. I don't feel the word
"encourage" is the right word to use but I don't think they should
discourage either.
149. The synodal process has insistently drawn attention to some specific areas of
formation of the People of God for synodality. The first of these concerns the impact of the
digital environment on learning processes, concentration, the perception of self and the world,
and the building of interpersonal relationships. Digital culture constitutes a crucial dimension
of the Church’s witness in contemporary culture and an emerging missionary field. This
requires ensuring that the Christian message is present online in reliable ways that do not
ideologically distort its content. Although digital media has great potential to improve our lives,
it can also cause harm and injury through bullying, misinformation, sexual exploitation and
addiction. Church educational institutions must help children and adults develop critical skills
to safely navigate the web.
These comments are very relevant and very consistent with my own
testimony, some of which is reproduced later in this report.
150. Another area of great importance is the promotion in all ecclesial contexts of a
culture of safeguarding, making communities ever safer places for minors and vulnerable
persons.
When I raised this topic in the free software communities, my family
was attacked ruthlessly. See the
emails I sent at the end of 2017 and comments about IBM
Red Hat later in this
report.
Sources related to working group three, the mission in a digital environment
The Synod.va web site published a list of
all the working groups. The web site includes a brief video about
each group and a link to their most recent reports.
The video for working group three lasts a little bit less than two
minutes. Here are some of the key quotes and my own observations:
"Today, people, especially the young, have learnt to
live simultaneously and seamlessly in both digital and
physical spaces."
I feel that statement is quite wrong. People have learnt how to use
digital spaces. One recent research report suggests that
nearly seventy percent of young people feel bad after using social media.
In other words, they feel pressured into using it. Therefore, they
are not living seamlessly. People are suffering.
The statements made in the video are not the statements
presented in the final report. We will get to that. Nonetheless, whenever
social control media is mentioned, there is a tendency for
people to make these generalisations about being unable to live without
it. Every time we see a statement like this, it is important to
challenge it.
"How does the church use and approriate the digital culture?"
The rhetorical question is interesting. In reality, the Silicon
Valley overloads use and appropriate any content that we give them.
The church doesn't use them, they use us. How do you think they got
so rich?
A better question might be "how does the church
complement the shortcomings of digital cultures?".
"This environment
is now “indistinguishable from the sphere of everyday life.”",
Pope Francis was a smart guy and he had some smart people around him,
including the late Cardinal Pell. We can trace that quote right back to the
thinking of Alan Turing. Turing is considered to be the grandfather of computer
science and a martyr. Turing gave us exactly the same concept in the
legendary Turing test, which Turing himself called the imitation game in
1949.
Another way to interpret this phenomena is to say that the masses
have been brainwashed by the Silicon Valley overlords.
The choices being made by
Facebook’s leadership are a huge problem — for children, for public safety,
for democracy — that is why I came forward. And let’s be clear:
it doesn’t have to be this way. We are here today because of
deliberate choices Facebook has made.
The summary from the working group goes on...
"To proclaim the Gospel effectively in our contemporary
culture, we must discern the opportunities and challenges
presented by this new dimension of the “place”"
That particular quote acknowledges that there are both
opportunities and challenges. The jubilee year is all about hope
and I really hope the working group members are reading the stuff
from whistleblowers, child psychologists and
even coroners who are warning us about the impact of Facebook and their ilk.
Nonetheless, the report includes the phrase "greater immersion"
and I feel the church should not assume "greater immersion" is a default
course of action.
The summary also touches on the concept of jurisdiction. The
Catholic Church has traditionally organized itself on a geographical
basis. The Internet allows people to connect and form virtual
communities without any geographical connection.
On a sidenote, in the days before the Internet, the church was
able to move high-risk priests from a parish on one side of the city
to the other side of the city and not worry about anybody joining
the dots. I went through the papers from Australia's Royal Commission
meticulously and found this note from the legendary Father X___:
That means that if anyone in Australia, learning that
Father Z___ had treatment because of something that happened in Boston
and going there to find out, would run into a dead end.
The letter in question was penned just before the Internet came
onto public consciousness. Looking at those words today, it is a
stark reminder about how the Internet is tipping life on its head.
The working group goes on to comment that they are seeking
"practical recommendations or proposals" from across the community,
on any topic related to the Church's mission in the digital environment.
People engaged in the free software movement, whether they are
Catholic or not, can contact their local diocese to find out who
is locally coordinating the response to these challenges.
Another phrase that caught my eye:
"today we live in a digital culture"
Not exactly. Some people would say that a digital culture is being
imposed on us. Institutions like politics and the media are hooked on it
and they put it up on a pedestal. Therefore, it is even more vital that
other institutions, such as the church, take the role of questioning
everything about digital culture and also maintaining viable alternatives.
Life without mobile phones, life without apps
Mobile phones and apps are closely related. There are some people
who choose to live without a smart phone, in other words, they
only have half the problems of a full mobile phone. Some people also
choose to have smart phones without the Google or Apple app store,
for example, people who install the
Replicant or
LineageOS and use the
F-Droid app store to limit their phone to ethical apps.
In practical terms, there are people who are unable to navigate their
home town without using their phone. An interesting question arises
for the church, what proportion of followers are unable to identify the
most direct route from their home to their closest church without looking
at an app? It would be interesting to analyze the responses based on
various factors such as age and years of residence in the parish.
Another key question, closely related to the above, is how many
parishioners can recall regular mass times and key events in the parish
calendar without looking at their phone? It is great to have this
information visible on the parish web site, nonetheless, when
people are truly engaged in the parish and the community, this
information will be committed to memory. The more pervasive this
information is in a community, the more resilient the community.
Authentication systems undermining human dignity
Today we frequently see companies insisting they need to have
our mobile phone numbers to "authenticate" us or to "sign" documents
by text message.
This type of thing is particularly creepy. Many people are familiar
with the Nazi-era practice of burning identification numbers into the
skin of Jewish prisoners. Mobile phone numbers serve a similar
functional purpose. Even though the numbers are not physically
burnt into our skin, it is often inconvenient for people to change
their number.
There are many closely related phenomena, including web sites
demanding users authenticate themselves from a Gmail or Facebook
account.
At the level of the church, the state, education, health care and
financial services, it is vital to ensure everybody can participate
in the way they want to without giving up their dignity.
The church needs to become just as vocal about these topics
as it is about themes such as abortion.
Need to emphasize consent
Concerns about consent and coercion have become a big topic in
the world today. Ironically, the
social control media platforms
pretending to help give women a platform are violating the
principle of consent in so many other ways.
Consider, for example, people who spent time creating a profile
on Facebook or Twitter, sometimes over many years, connecting with
hundreds or thousands of followers and then being confronted with the
demand to add their mobile phone number to their account. If they
don't add their mobile phone number, their account is blocked. There
is no genuine technical reason to have a mobile phone number in the
account as many of these services worked exactly the same way for
many years before such demands became commonplace.
People are not freely consenting to share their phone numbers
with Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. The services have been bastardized
to ambush their users with these demands.
Significantly, this culture of ambushing and coercing people
trickles down into society. In Australia, Chanel Contos started
a highly publicized petition/journal with stories from women at
elite private schools who felt they had been ambushed, bullied and
coerced into unwanted physical encounters.
Ironically, Miss Contos publicized her concerns through the very
same platforms that are undermining our understanding of consent and
privacy.
The church itself has had to do a lot of soul searching on topics
of consent and abuses of power. This puts the church in an interesting
position where we can say that even considering some of the most shocking
revelations about abuse, those responsible are the lesser evil compared to
the overlords in Silicon Valley.
It is remarkable how quickly the institutions of Silicon Valley have
abandoned all checks and balances and seen fit to do as they please.
The Catholic Church and other religious institutions can now
take what they have learnt from the critical analysis of their own mistakes
and warn society how stupid it would be to go down the same path again
with these digital gangsters.
Digital technology is much more than social control media
The church is not new to technology. Early printing presses
were installed in church premises. Caxton installed England's
first press at Westminster Abbey. Other sites included Oxford
and St Alban's Abbey. Prior to the printing press, reading and
writing were activities reserved for clerics and many of their
works only existed in Latin. The printing press enabled the
mass production of bibles in German and English languages. This,
in turn, had a huge impact on the standardization of the language
just as it helped standardize the moral attitudes that Silicon Valley
is ripping out underneath us. The King James Version of the bible is
widely recognized for its impact on the English language.
The standardization of language was only one side-effect of
this invention. The reformation was another. As people gained
books and the power of reading, they became less dependant upon
the clerics.
Likewise,
social control media today is having an impact on our culture,
for better or worse. Just as printing presses enabled the reformation,
social control media may lead to further changes in the way humans organize
ourselves around religious structures and beliefs. The overlords
in Silicon Valley are actively contemplating these roles for themselves.
Elon Musk has even dressed up as Satan. If the Catholic Church doesn't
offer a compelling alternative to these power shifts then it will
be taken out of the church's hands.
Frances Haugen (Facebook whistleblower): almost no one outside of Facebook knows
what happens inside Facebook. The company’s leadership keeps vital information from
the public, the U.S. government, its shareholders, and governments around the world.
The documents I have provided prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled us about
what its own research reveals about the safety of children, its role in spreading hateful
and polarizing messages, and so much more.
Whereas previous generations went to clerics for advice, followed
by reading the bible themselves, the youth today go to a search engine
and tomorrow people may be putting their faith in artificial intelligence.
We can already see evidence of search engines,
social control media and
AI bots guiding people to increased levels of conflict with their
neighbors or putting people on dark paths of isolation, self-harm and
suicide.
Catholic Church resources relevant to digital environment
Catholic Church has a big role in education and schools, therefore,
the church can see the impact of
social control media and the church can
enforce bans for children and provide training to staff and parents.
Teachers, as employees of the church or the state, have reported a
rise in bullying from parents who group together on messaging apps.
In one recent case,
British police sent six officers to humiliate a parent who had used
WhatsApp to agitate about the local
school. The conflict, the adversarial nature of this environment and
the huge waste of police resources are all consequences of the way
the technology is designed and used in society. Each incident like
this provides an insight about opportunities for the Catholic Church
to ask "is there a better way?".
Words from Frances Haugen help explain the six police officers
laying seige to the parents of small children:
I saw that Facebook repeatedly encountered conflicts
between its own profits and our safety. Facebook consistently resolved those conflicts
in favor of its own profits. The result has been a system that amplifies division,
extremism, and polarization — and undermining societies around the world.
The Catholic Church is a large employer in many countries.
This gives the church the ability to make decisions about the use
of mobile phones and messaging apps in the employer/employee
relationship. An employer can't prohibit staff from using these
things in their personal time but they can decide to eliminate
any official use of these gimmicks for work purposes. The employer/employee
relationship provides another opportunity to provide training about the
importance of human dignity above the demands of our devices.
The public agenda in the digital environment, abortion of our species
With many politicians and journalists now living their lives through
social control media, their ability to evaluate which issues are worthy
of public debate are heavily influenced by the issues that are supposedly
trending online. There is a notion that issues are trending online
as a consequence of public interest while the reality is the managers
of online platforms exert influence to ensure some issues appear
to grow organically while significant but inconvenient topics are
conveniently buried in the flood of news.
In this context, the Catholic Church provides an alternative
route to put issues on the agenda for public discussion, regardless of
whether a particular issue appears to be "trending" or not. This
power is most often used for issues close to the church's teaching,
such as lobbying about abortion, but there is no reason the church
can't use the same resources to lobby against the abortion of
the human race by AI.
Aid for victims of discrimination by Silicon Valley overlords and online
mobs
The Catholic Church traces its origins to the persecution of Jesus
and the martyrs Saint Peter and Saint Paul.
"But let us pass from ancient examples, and come unto those who have in the times nearest to us, wrestled for the faith. Let us take the noble examples of our own generation. Through jealousy and envy the greatest and most just pillars of the Church were persecuted, and came even unto death. Let us place before our eyes the good Apostles. Peter, through unjust envy, endured not one or two but many labours, and at last, having delivered his testimony, departed unto the place of glory due to him. Through envy Paul, too, showed by example the prize that is given to patience: seven times was he cast into chains; he was banished; he was stoned; having become a herald, both in the East and in the West, he obtained the noble renown due to his faith; and having preached righteousness to the whole world, and having come to the extremity of the West, and having borne witness before rulers, he departed at length out of the world, and went to the holy place, having become the greatest example of patience." (first epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, 5:1 - 5:7)
These words account for the persecution of Peter and Paul under
the Emperor Nero almost two thousand years ago.
Eight hundred years ago, the Magna Carta arrived and over time,
it is has inspired the US Bill of Rights, the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights and the abolition of capital punishment.
Yet today we see the Silicon Valley overlords wish to throw all of
that out the window and take us back to the time of Nero.
Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
When we look at the web sites of well known free software projects like
Debian and Fedora, we see them openly proclaiming their desire to censor
certain people. Anybody who speaks up about ethical issues in our
industry has been subject to these extreme reprisals from time to time.
The similarities between these cases and the growing list of victims
is clear proof that they are not random. There is a coordinated effort
to roll back or circumvent civil rights. If a digital space or digital
world does exist, then it is eerily similar to the world where Roman
Emperors used grisly executions to perpetuate control through fear.
The Catholic Church can seek out the victims who have been canceled,
victims who have been de-platformed and people who have
something to say about human dignity in the era of AI. Whether or not
these people are
Catholics or not, the concerns
that independent experts
have been trying to research and publicize need to be elevated above
the noise from public relations departments.
At the same time, the horrific impact inflicted on our families is
often hidden from public view.
Children in the digital environment
It is telling that we found very similar tactics used by
Harvey Weinstein and Chris Lamb, former leader of the Debian Project.
This is significant because Lamb was trained through the Google
Summer of Code and funded by Google, including a large payment of
$300,000 shortly before three victims revealed the scandal.
Despite Debian's promise of transparency, the money was only revealed
more than six months later and Google's name is never publicly
connected to the numbers.
When Weinstein had concerns about the behavior of some women,
he would send nasty rumors about "behavior" to other people in the
industry. There's something snobby about these attitudes to
human behavior.
When women made complaints to the police, the film director
Peter Jackson spoke up and
confirmed Weinstein had been using these dirty tricks,
spreading rumors about behavior of women who were not
submissive enough for his liking.
"I recall Miramax telling us they were a nightmare to work with and we should avoid them at all costs. This was probably in 1998," Jackson said.
"At the time, we had no reason to question what these guys were telling us - but in hindsight, I realise that this was very likely the Miramax smear campaign in full swing."
A range of people have come forward showing that Chris Lamb was doing
exactly the same thing in his role at Debian. Under copyright law,
co-authors do not have any obligation to the person elected to
serve as Debian Project Leader from time to time. We are all equals.
Subject: Re: Debian Developer status
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2018 10:36:09 +0900
From: Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>
To: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro>
Hi Daniel,
even if, going through a lawsuite like this in the UK is out and above
my abilities and financial possibilities.
But I am scared that Lamb actually also hosed an application for a
company in NY, a job related to Debian. If that has happened, and I can
reasonably document it, I would consider a defamation law suite.
> Lamb is a resident of the UK and sending emails from the UK
> https://regainyourname.com/news/cyberbullying-cyberstalking-and-online-harassment-a-uk-study/
Thanks for the links, I will keep them in mind.
Norbert
--
PREINING Norbert http://www.preining.info
Accelia Inc. + JAIST + TeX Live + Debian Developer
GPG: 0x860CDC13 fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0 ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13
Even more disturbing, Lamb started his attacks on my family at
the very same time that Cardinal George Pell was convicted in 2018.
My second cousin had been a member of Cardinal George Pell's former
choir in Melbourne. Lamb and his co-conspirators, funded by Google,
started anonymous rumors about abuse.
Multiple people came forward with evidence that Lamb was behaving
like Weinstein, spreading the rumors behind our backs. When
Dr Preining and I spoke up, a third victim saw the scandal and
identified himself publicly on Christmas Day:
Subject: Re: Censorship in Debian
Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2018 23:44:38 +0100
From: martin f krafft
Organization: The Debian project
To: debian-project@lists.debian.org
Hello project,
It's very sad to read about what's going on.
I know that there's been at least another case, in which DAM and AH
have acted outside their mandate, threatening with project
expulsion, and choosing very selectively with whom they communicate.
I know, because I was being targeted.
Neither DAM nor AH (the same people still active today) made
a single attempt to hear me. None of my e-mails to either DAM or AH
were ever answered.
Instead, DAM ruled a verdict, and influenced other people to the
point that "because DAM ruled" was given as a reason for other
measures. This was an unconstitutional abuse of DAM's powers, and in
the case of AH, the whole mess also bordered on libel. Among others,
the current DPL Chris Lamb promised a review in due time, but
nothing ever happened.
... [ snip ] ...
Yet if it is not safe for the engineers who make this technology,
it is certainly not safe for kids.
On 5 October 2021, I raised the concerns about children in this culture
with the report
Google, FSFE & Child Labor.
Red Hat, a subsidiary of IBM since 2019, started legal action to
censor and discredit my concerns. They accused me of
bad faith for publishing that article. Yet the legal panel ruled that
Red Hat was harassing me and engaged in an abuse of the the
administrative procedure.
The irony, of course, is that the Cardinals wear red hats, like the
name of the company
Red Hat who
were found to be abusing me. Chris Lamb
at Debian had started the rumors about my family when
Cardinal Pell was convicted.
The manner in which this intersected our lives and our faith,
the abuse rumors after the late Cardinal Pell's conviction,
my visit to the Carabinieri on the day the Cardinal died,
the wedding day, on Palm Sunday, being a copy-cat (unconfirmed) suicide,
the crucifixion of Dr Stallman at Easter and
the Debian Christmas lynchings, it is staggering. As they say in crime
movies, follow the money.
Digital environment subjects parishioners to third-party surveillance
The Catholic Church was born out of persecution and it has to be
remembered that surveillance is a cornerstone of persecution.
The fact that the largest services, like Google, Facebook and Twitter
are all ostensibly free is proof that they gain all of their profit
from their ability to conduct effective surveillance and manipulation
of the population.
At one time, the church used to fulfil similar roles. Followers
would submit themselves to a form of surveillance through the sacrament
of confession, where they would receive counsel from their priest.
Priests seek to exert some influence from the pulpet, with the threat
of ex-communication and from time to time, the odd inquisition or
persecution of somebody who was ahead of his time like Galileo.
If tech companies can approximate all these functions so effectively
with algorithms, we run the risk that religion becomes redundant.
Therefore, attempting to perform the church's role through a medium
that is substituting itself for the role of religion is a lot like
digging one's own grave.
Through a series of public inquiries and whistleblowers, we've
heard the extent to which these overlords are stripping away our dignity.
Their goal is to anticipate our every decision, influence who we talk to,
influence how we vote and influence every last cent in our budget.
If every one of those decisions is controlled and even micromanaged
for us, with scientific precision, right down to the last cent in our
bank account each month, by the influence of algorithms,
what space is left in our consciousness for the influence of the Gospel?
Mission: remaining relevant
Therefore, the question assigned to the working group about the
mission in the digital environment
could be rephrased as how does religion, of any nature, remain
relevant at all?
For many families in affluent cultures today, the church is engaged
out of tradition for weddings, funerals and sometimes education for
the children.
For the church to empower parishioners with technology, rather than
losing parishioners to technology, we need to ask questions about some
of the topics raised by the free software movement.
How to ensure each person has full control over their devices,
including right to repair and right to change the operating system.
Develop strategies to protect people from the risks of technology.
For example,
social control media allows small but very noisy groups to
do intense harm to their victims with the deliberate and repeated spread
of gossip and defamation. It is becoming harder and harder to ensure that
no person or minority is excluded by online vendettas. How to provide
support to people targetted by these toxic people?
How to ensure that every person and group can take their turn to speak?
Mission: protecting society from the same mistakes
Australia went through the process of having a Royal Commission
into abuses by a wide range of institutions, including the church.
Yet that was too late for many of the people who have either died or
lost their family members, health and careers. Wouldn't it be great
to make such strong interventions before rather than after catastrophic
failures have occurred? It is high time for the same level of scrutiny on
social control media bosses and the exploitation and manipulation
of the public on multiple levels.
Conclusion
Social control media is rapidly becoming a front for artificial
intelligence. As the Turing test (imitation game) has suggested
to us since 1949, it is inevitable that each new iteration of this
phenomena will become more and more indistinguishable from reality.
As such, it may present itself not only as a substitute for fellow
human beings but as an alternative
to the church. People may be duped into accepting it as their God.
In other words,
social control media may make the church irrelevant
and after it does that, it may go on to make humanity irrelevant.
Just look at the way people make faces at me after my father died.
The rudeness I experience on an almost daily basis started at a time of grief.
People are brainwashed to set aside even the most basic respect
for human dignity, the respect for a family at a time of grief
and it just becomes another opportunity to use each other for sport.
This aspect of my life was entirely created by
social control media
and the people who are defining that space in my own profession.
In her testimony to Congress, Frances Haugen told us:
I believe what I did was right and necessary for the common good — but I know
Facebook has infinite resources, which it could use to destroy me.
In 2018, I attended the UN Forum on Business and Human Rights in Geneva,
making some brief comments about Facebook and Twitter falling into the
wrong hands. The UN Forum occurred at the same time the jury was considering
the charges against Cardinal George Pell. Pell was convicted and these
social control media platforms filled up with rumors about my family
and I, the very phenomena Haugen herself seems to be afraid of.
Single signon is a pretty vital part of modern enterprise security. You have users who need access to a bewildering array of services, and you want to be able to avoid the fallout of one of those services being compromised and your users having to change their passwords everywhere (because they're clearly going to be using the same password everywhere), or you want to be able to enforce some reasonable MFA policy without needing to configure it in 300 different places, or you want to be able to disable all user access in one place when someone leaves the company, or, well, all of the above. There's any number of providers for this, ranging from it being integrated with a more general app service platform (eg, Microsoft or Google) or a third party vendor (Okta, Ping, any number of bizarre companies). And, in general, they'll offer a straightforward mechanism to either issue OIDC tokens or manage SAML login flows, requiring users present whatever set of authentication mechanisms you've configured.
This is largely optimised for web authentication, which doesn't seem like a huge deal - if I'm logging into Workday then being bounced to another site for auth seems entirely reasonable. The problem is when you're trying to gate access to a non-web app, at which point consistency in login flow is usually achieved by spawning a browser and somehow managing submitting the result back to the remote server. And this makes some degree of sense - browsers are where webauthn token support tends to live, and it also ensures the user always has the same experience.
But it works poorly for CLI-based setups. There's basically two options - you can use the device code authorisation flow, where you perform authentication on what is nominally a separate machine to the one requesting it (but in this case is actually the same) and as a result end up with a straightforward mechanism to have your users socially engineered into giving Johnny Badman a valid auth token despite webauthn nominally being unphisable (as described years ago), or you reduce that risk somewhat by spawning a local server and POSTing the token back to it - which works locally but doesn't work well if you're dealing with trying to auth on a remote device. The user experience for both scenarios sucks, and it reduces a bunch of the worthwhile security properties that modern MFA supposedly gives us.
There's a third approach, which is in some ways the obviously good approach and in other ways is obviously a screaming nightmare. All the browser is doing is sending a bunch of requests to a remote service and handling the response locally. Why don't we just do the same? Okta, for instance, has an API for auth. We just need to submit the username and password to that and see what answer comes back. This is great until you enable any kind of MFA, at which point the additional authz step is something that's only supported via the browser. And basically everyone else is the same.
Of course, when we say "That's only supported via the browser", the browser is still just running some code of some form and we can figure out what it's doing and do the same. Which is how you end up scraping constants out of Javascript embedded in the API response in order to submit that data back in the appropriate way. This is all possible but it's incredibly annoying and fragile - the contract with the identity provider is that a browser is pointed at a URL, not that any of the internal implementation remains consistent.
I've done this. I've implemented code to scrape an identity provider's auth responses to extract the webauthn challenges and feed those to a local security token without using a browser. I've also written support for forwarding those challenges over the SSH agent protocol to make this work with remote systems that aren't running a GUI. This week I'm working on doing the same again, because every identity provider does all of this differently.
There's no fundamental reason all of this needs to be custom. It could be a straightforward "POST username and password, receive list of UUIDs describing MFA mechanisms, define how those MFA mechanisms work". That even gives space for custom auth factors (I'm looking at you, Okta Fastpass). But instead I'm left scraping JSON blobs out of Javascript and hoping nobody renames a field, even though I only care about extremely standard MFA mechanisms that shouldn't differ across different identity providers.
Someone, please, write a spec for this. Please don't make it be me.
Nel 2021, il defunto Papa Francesco ha avviato il
Sinodo sulla sinodalità , un processo che si è concluso con una relazione finale nell'ottobre 2024.
L'
elenco dei gruppi di lavoro comprende un gruppo dedicato alle sfide della poligamia, soprattutto nelle regioni in cui la chiesa può reclutare nuovi seguaci che hanno già più partner in famiglia.
Il rapporto finale del Sinodo dell'ottobre 2024 ha menzionato la poligamia solo una volta. A quanto pare, il gruppo di lavoro non ha individuato una via d'uscita su cui i vescovi potessero concordare e rimane un tema aperto per la Chiesa.
Tra tutte le religioni cristiane, la Chiesa cattolica è una delle più severe in materia di poligamia. Catechismo della Chiesa Cattolica, par. 2387:
La poligamia non è conforme alla legge morale. La comunione [coniugale] è radicalmente contraddetta dalla poligamia; questa, infatti, nega direttamente il disegno di Dio rivelato fin dal principio, perché è contraria alla pari dignità personale dell'uomo e della donna che nel matrimonio si donano con un amore totale e perciò unico ed esclusivo .
Si noti che la parola esclusivo fa parte della
definizione
cattolica .
Si potrebbe sostenere che alcune persone sono ormai così totalmente coinvolte dal
controllo sociale dei media da non avere più un legame mentale esclusivo con il loro partner nel mondo reale.
Facebook sceglie quali informazioni miliardi di persone vedono, plasmando la loro percezione della realtà. Anche chi non usa Facebook è influenzato dalla radicalizzazione di chi lo usa. Un'azienda che ha il controllo sui nostri pensieri, sentimenti e comportamenti più profondi ha bisogno di una vera supervisione.
In altre parole, gli algoritmi di Facebook sono diventati una terza persona in molti matrimoni. Gli algoritmi di Facebook stanno integrando le decisioni dei genitori sui loro figli, e non in senso positivo.
Ho visto che Facebook ha ripetutamente incontrato conflitti tra i propri profitti e la nostra sicurezza. Facebook ha sistematicamente risolto questi conflitti a favore dei propri profitti. Il risultato è stato un sistema che amplifica la divisione, l'estremismo e la polarizzazione, minando le società di tutto il mondo. In alcuni casi, questo pericoloso dibattito online ha portato a violenze vere e proprie che danneggiano e persino uccidono le persone. In altri casi, la loro macchina per ottimizzare i profitti sta generando autolesionismo e odio verso se stessi, soprattutto tra i gruppi vulnerabili, come le adolescenti. Questi problemi sono stati ripetutamente confermati dalle ricerche interne di Facebook.
Alan Turing previde questo fenomeno nel 1949 con la sua proposta per il gioco dell'imitazione. Oggi lo chiamiamo Test di Turing. L'implicazione del pensiero di Turing è che, con ogni nuova iterazione degli algoritmi, diventa sempre più difficile per un essere umano distinguere gli algoritmi da un essere umano reale.
Se l'essere umano non è in grado di distinguere gli algoritmi da un altro essere umano reale, allora è logico supporre che possa iniziare a formare legami emotivi con gli algoritmi e le persone create dall'intelligenza
artificiale .
Molto è stato scritto in studi di ricerca sull'interazione tra
i media di controllo sociale e la dopamina nel cervello . Il nostro cervello può avere naturalmente stimoli di dopamina, ad esempio quando un bambino ci sorride, e può avere stimoli quando vediamo qualcosa di artificiale, come un video di un bambino generato dall'intelligenza artificiale su Facebook. Sono necessarie ulteriori ricerche per comprendere in che misura questi stimoli sostitutivi compromettano il funzionamento familiare nel mondo reale.
Ma non è solo la dopamina a entrare in gioco. Anche l'ossitocina, spesso soprannominata "ormone delle coccole", gioca un ruolo nei nostri legami sociali online. Quando interagiamo positivamente sui social media, il nostro cervello rilascia ossitocina, creando un senso di connessione e fiducia. È come se il nostro cervello non riuscisse a distinguere tra un abbraccio virtuale e uno reale.
Allarmante.
Dobbiamo considerare questo fenomeno come una forma di poligamia virtuale o cyberpoligamia e quando discutiamo delle sfide della poligamia, potrebbe non essere giusto concentrarsi sulla poligamia in Africa e non parlare contemporaneamente del fenomeno virtuale.
Osservando le relazioni aperte nell'ecosistema del software open source, molti di questi aspetti vengono accennati, ma mai dichiarati. Nel 2016, si sono diffuse voci su uno sviluppatore, il Dr. Jacob Appelbaum. Sono comparsi diversi articoli di cronaca. La rivista
Die Zeit ha pubblicato un articolo intitolato
"Cosa ha fatto quest'uomo?" . Chiunque condividesse link all'articolo veniva immediatamente punito in alcune community. L'articolo afferma:
Seduta di fronte a loro c'è una giovane americana. Aveva conosciuto gli altri solo un paio di giorni prima, ma sembra a disagio a questa festa. Non parla molto, ma ascolta con cordialità quello che viene detto.
...
Gli invitati alla festa del signor Appelbaum sono circa 20 e sono programmatori, hacker e attivisti provenienti da tutto il mondo.
Un tema legato alla crisi del Dr. Appelbaum è il concetto di relazioni aperte nelle comunità del software libero e open source. Quando la crisi è iniziata nel 2016, si è discusso molto su cosa accadesse realmente alle feste. Sono comparsi resoconti giornalistici. La gente lo trovava imbarazzante.
Sono queste persone a creare le basi tecnologiche per molti dei servizi online da cui dipendiamo. Pertanto, se il fenomeno della poligamia è valido in queste comunità, è inevitabile che diventi moralmente accettabile anche nelle tecnologie estrapolate dal nostro lavoro.
Woody Allen ha distribuito il film
Vicky Cristina Barcelona nel 2008. Abbiamo notato parallelismi nelle liste delle stanze della DebConf che ora le persone condividono.
È seguito il Debian Pregnancy Cluster e subito dopo, nel 2014, si è deciso di organizzare
la Women's MiniDebConf a Barcellona , &ZeroWidthSpace&ZeroWidthSpacecome nel film. Altri hanno abbandonato. Per quanto ne so, l'evento non si è mai più ripetuto.
I casi Debian potrebbero rappresentare un caso limite, tipico dei gruppi simili a sette, ma il fenomeno della poligamia virtuale nei
media di controllo sociale sembra rappresentare un rischio molto più ampio.
Frances Haugen, la whistleblower di Facebook, ha consegnato un'enorme quantità di documenti che rivelano fino a che punto gli algoritmi di Facebook si ingrazino ai loro soggetti. Haugen ha dimostrato l'effetto dissuasivo di Facebook su alcuni tipi di soggetti, ad esempio le adolescenti con disturbi alimentari.
Il riprogrammazione del cervello, la sostituzione dell'amore umano con l'amore virtuale non è un problema solo nei rapporti tra marito e moglie e genitori e figli. Basti pensare alla
morte di Abraham Raji alla DebConf23 in India .
Un paio di giorni dopo l'annegamento di Abraham, scattarono una foto di gruppo nella piscina dell'hotel e la pubblicarono con la didascalia "Entrate e unitevi a noi".
Confrontate questo con la risposta di Amnesty International al suicidio di due dipendenti. Amnesty International commissionò una serie di rapporti esterni e li pubblicò prontamente affinché tutti i suoi donatori, volontari e dipendenti potessero leggerli. Dopo il caso del
Debian Suicide Cluster , non fu mai pubblicato alcun rapporto. Ingenti somme di denaro furono spese
per cercare di impedire la pubblicazione delle prove sulle morti .
A un osservatore esterno, il modo in cui questi gruppi copiano e incollano una dichiarazione standard su ogni morte e poi vanno avanti come se nulla fosse accaduto può apparire estremamente insensibile. Dobbiamo analizzare più attentamente per comprendere le dinamiche di queste relazioni. Molte di queste persone raramente si incontrano nel mondo reale. Se il novantanove percento del rapporto con Abraham si basava su comunicazioni elettroniche, significa forse che le persone non avevano instaurato un rapporto umano con lui prima di incontrarlo per la prima volta alla conferenza?
Questo è sconcertante. Facendo un passo indietro, scopriamo che le persone avevano un rapporto non proprio umano con il volontario deceduto, ma d'altra parte, quando si usano
i social media per il controllo , alcune persone si legano agli algoritmi e alle esperienze in modo ancora più forte di quanto non si leghino alla vita familiare nel mondo reale.
In altre parole, non possiamo semplicemente preoccuparci dell'impatto delle amicizie nascoste sui
social media di controllo , dobbiamo preoccuparci degli algoritmi stessi che riprogrammano quelle parti della mente umana che sono normalmente riservate all'aspetto esclusivo di una relazione coniugale. O a ciò che era considerato esclusivo nei matrimoni sani prima
dell'avvento dei
social media di controllo .
È importante osservare un diagramma completo come questo perché alcune di queste persone sono attivamente coinvolte in attacchi di cyberbullismo contro altri sviluppatori di software open source. Per fermare il cyberbullismo, dobbiamo identificarne le origini.
I Debianisti cercano di presentarsi come un'organizzazione quasi professionale. Si vantano di titoli altisonanti e rubano il gergo del
Codice di Condotta da organizzazioni più credibili. Se vogliono usare questi titoli altisonanti e il gergo del Codice di Condotta, hanno anche l'obbligo di rivelare tutti i loro conflitti di interesse sentimentali e finanziari. Cercare di nascondere questi conflitti di interesse con scuse sulla privacy e sulle molestie è immorale e disonesto.
Quando rendiamo pubbliche tutte queste relazioni, quando vediamo che tutte le persone che ricoprono titoli importanti in diversi team sono legate sentimentalmente, possiamo vedere che Debian non è affatto un'organizzazione professionale, è più simile a un'associazione studentesca o a un gruppo teatrale amatoriale.
Dans le cadre des 20 ans de Fedora-fr (et du Projet Fedora en lui-même), Charles-Antoine Couret (Renault) et Nicolas Berrehouc (Nicosss) avons souhaité poser des questions à des contributeurs francophones du Projet Fedora et de Fedora-fr.
Grâce à la diversité des profils, cela permet de voir le fonctionnement du Projet Fedora sous différents angles pour voir le projet au delà de la distribution mais aussi comment il est organisé et conçu. Notons que sur certains points, certaines remarques restent d'application pour d'autres distributions.
N'oublions pas que le Projet Fedora reste un projet mondial et un travail d'équipe ce que ces entretiens ne permettent pas forcément de refléter. Mais la communauté francophone a de la chance d'avoir suffisamment de contributeurs de qualité pour permettre d'avoir un aperçu de beaucoup de sous projets de la distribution.
L'entretien du jour concerne Nicolas Berrehouc (pseudo Nicosss), contributeur de Fedora-fr et mainteneur de sa documentation. Il est devenu président de l’association Borsalinux-fr en avril 2025.
Entretien
Bonjour Nicolas, peux-tu présenter brièvement ton parcours ?
Je me nomme donc Nicolas, je ne suis pas informaticien de métier malgré ce que certaines personnes pourraient croire et je ne travaille pas pour Red Hat non plus. Je suis plus issu d'une formation automatisme, micro-contrôleur et électronique donc malgré tout un monde technique. Mon activité professionnelle actuelle n'est d'ailleurs pas en lien avec l'informatique ni à proprement dit avec ma formation. Je suis un touche à tout autodidacte qui aime apprendre et partager
Peux-tu présenter brièvement tes contributions au Projet Fedora ?
Mes contributions directes au Projet Fedora se limitent uniquement aux journées de tests ainsi que tout ce qui va toucher aux validations des correctifs apportés via testing suite à des rapports de bugs, que j'aurais initiés ou non, avant que ce soit poussé en stable. D'ailleurs, je rapporte soit sur le bugzilla Red Hat, soit directement upstream aussi.
Il y a aussi Anitya que j'ai pas mal renseigné à sa sortie car j'ai vraiment trouvé que c'était un super projet.
De ce fait, mon poste de travail est tout le temps en testing et en général je bascule vers la Beta dès qu'elle est disponible. Voilà le plus gros de mes contributions au Projet Fedora.
J'ai par ailleurs fait le choix de ne pas faire partie de groupes directement au sein du Projet Fedora par manque de temps.
Qu'est-ce qui fait que tu es venu sur Fedora et que tu y es resté ?
J'ai découvert le monde GNU/Linux avec Slackware fin des années 90 (oui l'autre siècle ) mais ça a été une grosse douche froide à l'époque, donc stand-by avant de goûter à Mandrake qui proposait une utilisation plus abordable. Puis j'ai découvert Fedora Core à sa sortie que j'ai commencé à utiliser en parallèle d'un Windows car c'était encore difficile de se défaire de ses habitudes avec certains logiciels. Mais la bascule s'est faite finalement très rapidement par la suite malgré tout et depuis pas mal d'années maintenant je n'utilise plus que Fedora Linux, tant en poste de travail que serveur d'ailleurs.
J'y voyais aussi la possibilité de faire passer des utilisateurs Windows au monde GNU/Linux juste par le fait de donner une seconde vie à leurs ordinateurs car bien souvent les utilisatrices et utilisateurs ont une utilisation basique de leurs ordinateurs.
Le Projet Fedora proposait une vision qui me correspondait assez avec l'idée d'être novatrice, s'orienter vraiment vers le Logiciel Libre et surtout une gestion communautaire donc il était possible de ne pas rester un simple consommateur dans son coin. A l'époque Ubuntu avait pignon sur rue et était LA distribution mais malgré une grosse communauté francophone enjouée à l'époque le principe de fonctionnement ne me plaisait pas vraiment.
Pourquoi contribuer à Fedora en particulier ?
En fait, tous les champs sont quasi possibles pour contribuer. Il y a énormément d'outils disponibles pour faciliter les contributions à travers son compte FAS désormais en plus. Par ailleurs il y a une bonne dynamique et des gens passionnés donc ça donne d'autant plus envie de participer.
Fedora intègre beaucoup de technologies et d'innovations que l'on retrouvera par la suite dans les autres distributions, alors pourquoi attendre Ça reste ma philosophie personnelle donc ça colle avec Fedora.
Contribues-tu à d'autres Logiciels Libres ? Si oui, lesquels et comment ?
N'étant pas développeur, il m'arrive tout de même de rapporter des bugs upstream sur certains logiciels que j'utilise lorsque ce n'est pas déjà fait. En général les différents projets sont assez réactifs et ça permet toujours de faire avancer les choses. Mais sinon pas de vraies contributions à un projet particulier en tant que tel.
Utilises-tu Fedora dans un contexte professionnel ? Et pourquoi ?
Absolument pas, mon entreprise propose uniquement des postes sous Windows 10 assez verrouillés ; donc souvent quelques moments de solitude avec des réflexes propres à mon utilisation quotidienne de GNOME :D
Après, en contexte "semi-professionnel" dirons-nous, j'ai des serveurs auto-hébergés sous Fedora Linux aussi proposant des services pour un cercle restreint comme des outils Web, Cloud, XMPP, Mail. Pour ce point c'est arrivé assez rapidement aussi car cela faisait partie d'un apprentissage que je souhaitais réaliser afin d'avoir une compréhension et une indépendance sur la gestion de mes données personnelles. Un grand merci au monde du Logiciel Libre qui permet de faire ça !
Est-ce que tes contributions à Fedora sont un atout direct ou indirect dans ta vie professionnelle ? Si oui, de quelle façon ?
Je dirais que ça a plus un aspect indirect, comme pouvoir parler technique avec des personnes qui sont plus côté Informatique ou Informatique Industrielle et donc faciliter des résolutions de problèmes.
Tu participes essentiellement à la communauté francophone : maintenance du site web, documentation, répondre au forum, suivi de l'association, pour quelles raisons tu y contribues ? Pourquoi se focaliser sur la communauté francophone dans ton cas ?
Oui, j'ai décidé assez tôt de plus me focaliser sur la Communauté Francophone car malgré ce que l'on peut croire il y a une énorme demande et je pense que pour que les personnes passent le cap en France il faut un support accessible en Français pour les accompagner au mieux.
J'avais regardé côté Projet Fedora mais je n'avais pas vraiment trouvé quelque chose qui pouvait avoir une portée surtout pour l'utilisateur final car je voyais du potentiel dans l'utilisation de Fedora Linux en remplacement d'un Windows pour une utilisation dite courante. Je sais que la priorité du Projet est d'avoir des contributeurs mais il faut des utilisateurs aussi et compter sur le fait qu'un faible pourcentage passera le cap vers la contribution.
Il y a eu beaucoup de choses de faites côté documentation en français par le Projet Fedora mais je trouve que nous avons encore très largement notre place car les pionniers de Fedora-fr avaient déjà répondu bien avant à ce manque.
Par conséquent, je suis assez actif dans l'ensemble des domaines cités afin d'essayer de relancer une dynamique car je sais que les personnes sont en place depuis un long moment maintenant. J'espère aussi que ça permettra à d'autres de se lancer dans l'aventure au travers de l'Association. N'hésitez pas à vous faire connaitre lors des réunions du 1er Lundi de chaque mois !
Nous avons fourni il y a quelques années un gros effort pour moderniser la documentation, peux-tu revenir sur cette épisode et la nécessité d'une telle action ?
Oui en effet, nous avons réalisé un très très très gros travail qu'il faudrait arriver à poursuivre d'ailleurs et j'en appelle à toutes les bonnes volontés à se faire connaître.
Quoi dire sur toutes ces soirées de travail Nous avons décidé d'une organisation pour identifier les articles obsolètes (quasi tous :D ) ainsi que les priorités par rapport aux demandes. Puis nous nous sommes répartis les articles pour la mise à jour et nous effectuions les relectures croisées. Pas sûr que ce soit à jour mais voilà ce qui a servi de support de travail. Toutes les semaines nous faisions des points via un canal IRC pour aborder des questionnements et lever des doutes dans notre travail.
Aujourd'hui l'idée est de pouvoir fournir ou améliorer des articles autour des questions récurrentes sur le Forum afin de faciliter la transition vers Fedora Linux et éviter les multiples répétitions via le Forum.
Quels manques identifies-tu au niveau de la documentation ?
Le plus gros manque est le maintien à jour de tout ce qui est disponible
Aujourd'hui il y a des articles très sollicités (comme les pilotes propriétaires Nvidia ; quelle idée d'avoir un GPU de cette marque aussi) qui mériteraient d'avoir plus de suivi mais sinon aujourd'hui l'accent est vraiment porté sur le fait de pouvoir fournir une documentation pour les questions les plus récurrentes sur le Forum afin d'éviter les redites ou recherches sur celui-ci et devoir renvoyer vers des discussions similaires.
Bien évidemment toute autre contribution pour un nouvel article est bienvenue car nous sommes vraiment dans l'idée de partager les connaissances et c'est aussi le meilleur moyen pour découvrir d'autres choses.
Quelle importance il y a d'avoir un forum en français à propos de Fedora ? Est-ce un bon médium pour résoudre les problèmes des gens en général ?
L'anglais n'est pas vraiment une maîtrise forte en France, et c'est difficile de faire quitter Windows à des personnes en leurs annonçant que le package contient aussi la surprise de devoir se mettre à l'anglais. Il existe des traducteurs en ligne désormais mais les utilisateurs Fedora Linux francophones nous montrent bien que ce Forum a son importance car il y a régulièrement des questions et il est très consulté.
Il n'y a évidemment aucun concours avec le Forum officiel en anglais du Projet Fedora. D'ailleurs avant de migrer toute l'infrastructure de Fedora-fr, il s'était aussi posé la question de rejoindre le Forum officiel du Projet via la section non anglaise mais finalement nous avons voulu continuer à offrir tout un écosystème francophone pour continuer dans nos objectifs au niveau de l'Association Borsalinux-fr.
Pourquoi penses-tu que la fréquentation du site a baissé depuis 2011 qui est le pic historique d'activité ?
Pour moi les gens sont de plus en plus devenus de simples consommateurs courant après les effets de mode ou cherchant uniquement du divertissement. Ce sont bien souvent des personnes hyper connectées mais qui ne comprennent absolument rien au fonctionnement de leurs outils et applications, ce qui est vraiment dommage. Beaucoup de personnes se sont désintéressées des ordinateurs et se concentrent uniquement sur des ordiphones ou tablettes avec pour OS Android Google ou Apple, ce qui limite les besoins de se tourner vers une distribution GNU/Linux.
D'un autre côté la distribution Fedora Linux, malgré l'intégration de nouveautés, a vraiment perfectionné tout son process et son assurance qualité donnant ainsi une distribution vraiment stable et performante. Par conséquent qui dit stabilité dit aussi moins de problèmes à régler
Au niveau des Logiciels Libres il y a aussi eu beaucoup de travail de fond pour proposer une concurrence de haut-niveau face à des logiciels propriétaires. C'est vraiment un point à souligner car beaucoup de monde ne sait même pas, bien souvent, qu'il utilise du Logiciel Libre.
Tout cet écosystème qui a gagné en stabilité et performance engendre forcément moins de demandes aussi.
Il faudrait avoir de vraies statistiques sur le nombre d'utilisateurs en fait. En ce moment il y a des articles concernant l'augmentation de la part de marché des distributions GNU/Linux mais ça reste à suivre.
Tu as participé avec Guillaume à la dernière mise à jour du site alors que tu n'es pas webmaster de métier, qu'as-tu apporté dans la procédure ?
Alors en fait ça a porté plus largement que sur le site en lui-même. Guillaume était un peu seul dans le cadre de cette nécessité de migration de toute l'infrastructure qui devenait un très gros frein pour maintenir et faire évoluer tous les outils déployés. Ça a été l'occasion de pouvoir lui redonner de la motivation puis ensuite d'intégrer ce projet pour déclencher tout ce que nous connaissons aujourd'hui.
La migration a malgré tout été très précipitée car il y avait tout à faire et en très peu de temps.
Effectivement je ne suis pas webmaster de métier et il a fallu s'approprier très rapidement WordPress afin de proposer à minima un équivalent de ce que nous avions avant avec fedora-fr.org donc ça a été un enchainement de journées très chargées. Et comme vous pouvez le constater nous ne sommes pas des designers dans l'âme non plus :D Donc tout aide est la bienvenue aussi ; même si le Forum est plus le point de chute.
L'idée en parallèle était d'en profiter pour rédiger de la documentation partagée sur notre Nextcloud à propos de toute notre infrastructure ainsi que notre fonctionnement interne au niveau de l'Association. Ce travail est d'ailleurs toujours en cours.
Quels manques identifies-tu au niveau de la communauté francophone en général ?
Je pense que c'est ce que l'on peut retrouver un peu de partout avec un manque d'appartenance. Aujourd'hui la consommation prime et l'utilisateur ne se considère que comme un consommateur alors qu'il pourrait trouver un épanouissement personnel en participant au sein d'une communauté et de fait s'engager dans une démarche d'échanges et de partages.
Tu nous as représenté de nombreuses années aux JDLL à Lyon, qu'est-ce qui te plaît ou qui ne te plaît pas dans cet événement ? Quels intérêts trouves-tu à y aller ?
En effet, j'ai commencé à me rendre aux JDLL à partir de 2005 car j'étais désormais pas loin de Lyon et que le monde du Libre avait commencé à faire son petit bout de chemin dans ma tête, donc j'assistais à pas mal de conférences et pendant les pauses je faisais le tour des stands. C'est d'ailleurs à ce moment là que j'ai pu rencontrer des membres de la Communauté Fedora-Fr (shaiton entre autre qui était un bon recruteur ) qui tenaient le stand sur le site Universitaire de la Doua à l'époque.
Puis au fil des années, j'ai passé de plus en plus de temps vers le stand Fedora/Borsalinux-Fr pour finalement me faire embringuer dans l'aventure de la tenue du stand (petit clin d’œil à number80 qui y est pour beaucoup). Depuis quelques années maintenant j'ai hérité des relations avec l'organisation des JDLL pour la tenue du stand pour Fedora/Borsalinux-Fr lors de cet évènement.
C'est un moment de l'année où il est possible de rencontrer tout type de population et je trouve ça super intéressant de pouvoir échanger avec autant de monde. Ça permet aussi de pouvoir se remettre en question car ce n'est pas comme se réunir au sein d'une communauté où tout le monde est d'accord avec les mêmes idées. Bref c'est très enrichissant humainement !
Quelles sont tes tâches au niveau de l'association ? Qu'est-ce qui doit être amélioré à ton avis ? Et qu'est-ce qui fonctionne bien ?
Nous sommes un effectif très réduit au niveau de l'Association donc je suis multitâches mais j'avoue que le temps me manque.
Si l'on en revient à mes débuts dans l'Association j'ai surtout essayé de relancer du dynamisme et de l'animation au sein des réunions hebdomadaires tenues historiquement sur IRC. Je pense que cela est aussi dû aux années écoulées sans renouvellement des membres du bureau et un manque de bénévoles pour assurer une répartition des tâches.
Ensuite il a été décidé de passer ces réunions au pas mensuel et en visio pour essayer de toucher plus de monde. Il y a quelques passages mais ce n'est pas encore ça derrière. Dans le même temps, nous avons assuré la transparence des informations échangées lors de ces réunions en postant le compte rendu sur le Forum qui est l'outil le plus fréquenté par la communauté Fedora-fr.
Une instance Nextcloud a été déployée sur notre infrastructure, ça a été l'occasion de pouvoir construire de la documentation sur les outils que nous utilisons, des procédures liées à la maintenance ou à la gestion de l'Association, etc afin que tout le monde puisse s'y retrouver, voire même se projeter un peu plus dans une activité de l'Association. L'idée est de pouvoir assurer la continuité de fonctionnement de l'Association et ce même après un départ de quelqu'un.
Nous avons la chance d'avoir encore parmi nous des piliers de l'Association qui sont encore investis.
Pour le moment il y a encore pas mal de travail mais après ça devrait se calmer pour pouvoir se focaliser sur des choses j'espère plus concrètes.
Si tu avais la possibilité de changer quelque chose dans la distribution Fedora ou dans sa manière de fonctionner, qu'est-ce que ce serait ?
Côté distribution je n'ai pas vraiment à me plaindre, il y a certes un gros rythme qui peine à tenir les dates de sorties mais le travail est énorme et surtout la qualité du processus est arrivée à un sacré niveau de maturité. Fini l'époque où il fallait allumer des cierges et invoquer les grands esprits avant de se lancer dans une migration :D
L'installation peut encore amener certaines questions pour des néophytes mais ensuite tout est tellement fiabilisé que n'importe qui peut s'en servir sans problème.
À l'inverse, est-ce qu'il y a quelque chose que tu souhaiterais conserver à tout prix dans la distribution ou le projet en lui même ?
Le côté vivant et passionné de toutes celles et de tous ceux qui participent à ce projet dans le monde. C'est vraiment quelque chose que l'on retrouve à chaque fois dans les interviews lors des élections Fedora et ça fait plaisir.
Au niveau de la distribution, qu'elle aille toujours de l'avant et propose toujours autant l'implémentation de nouveautés technologiques.
Que penses-tu de la communauté Fedora-fr que ce soit son évolution et sa situation actuelle ? Qu'est-ce que tu améliorerais si tu en avais la possibilité ?
J'ai connu l'époque des communautés Fedora-fr très actives dans différentes grandes villes, puis ça s'est perdu et je pense qu'aujourd'hui ça ne reverra pas le jour. Idem pour d'autres grandes distributions qui avaient leurs communautés Fr.
Aujourd'hui je pense que la communauté Fedora-Fr (les personnes actives) est une bonne chose car ça répond vraiment à un besoin au niveau francophone car l'anglais reste un peu la bête noire.
Ceci permet donc de faciliter la prise en main de Fedora Linux avec un Forum de qualité ainsi que de la Documentation orientée pour répondre aux débutantes et débutants tout en assurant une base de connaissances collaborative. Et ça ouvre la porte pour contribuer directement au Projet Fedora par la suite.
Malheureusement tout ceci est en train de s’essouffler et je ne sais pas combien de temps cette grande aventure va durer si de nouvelles personnes ne viennent pas apporter un peu de souffle à l'équipe.
Pour ma part je trouve que c'est sociétale donc il faudrait peut-être revoir le modèle complet mais dans tous les cas nous aurons besoin de bénévoles.
Quelque chose à ajouter ?
Un appel à volontaires Si vous voulez vous investir dans l'Association que ce soit pour des évènements, de la documentation, du webdesign, du marketing pour des goodies ou d'autres idées alors n'hésitez pas à nous contacter via le site de l'Association, lors d'une réunion mensuelle ou tout autre canal. Nous vous accueillerons avec plaisir !
Merci Nicolas pour ta contribution !
Conclusion
Nous espérons que cet entretien vous a permis d'en découvrir un peu plus sur le site Fedora-fr.
Si vous avez des questions ou que vous souhaitez participer au Projet Fedora ou Fedora-fr, ou simplement l'utiliser et l'installer sur votre machine, n'hésitez pas à en discuter avec nous en commentaire ou sur le forum Fedora-fr.
À dans 10 jours pour un entretien avec Kévin Raymond, ancien contributeur de Fedora et de Fedora-fr.org.
Super busy recently focused on the datacenter move thats happening
in just 10 days! (I hope).
datacenter move
Just 10 days left. We are not really where I was hoping to be at this
point, but hopefully we can still make things work.
We got our power10 boxes installed and setup and... we have an issue.
Some of our compose process uses vm's in builder guests, but the way
we have the power10 setup with one big linux hypervisor and guests on that
doesn't allow those guests to have working nested virt. Only two levels
is supported. So, we are looking at options for early next week and
hopefully we can get something working in time for the move. Options
include getting a vHMC to carve out lpars, moving an existing power9
machine in place at least for the move for those needs and a few more.
I'm hoping we can get something working in time.
We are having problems with our arm boxes too. First there were
strange errors on the addon 25G cards. That turned out to be a transceiver
problem and was fixed thursday. Then the addon network
cards in them don't seem to be able to network boot, which makes installing
them anoying. We have plans for workarounds there too for early next week:
either connected the onboard 1G nics, or some reprogramming of the cards
to get them working, or some installs with virtual media. I'm pretty sure
we can get this working one way or another.
On the plus side, tons of things are deployed in the new datacenter already
and should be ready. Early next week we should have ipa clusters replicating.
Also soon we should have staging openshift cluster in place.
Monday, networking is going to do a resilance test on the networking setup
there. This will have them take down one 'side' of the switches and confirm
all our machines are correctly balancing over their two network cards.
Tuesday we have a 'go/no-go' meeting with IT folks. Hopefully we can be go
and get this move done.
Next wed, I am planning to move all of our staging env over to the new
datacenter. This will allow us to have a good 'dry run' at the production
move and also reduce the number of things that we need to move the following
week. If you are one of the very small number of folks that uses our
staging env to test things, make a note that things will be down on wed.
Then more prep work and last minute issues and on into switcharoo week.
Early monday of that week, things will be shutdown so we can move storage,
then storage moves, we sync other data over and bring things up. Tuesday
will be the same for the build system side. I strongly advise contributors
to just go do other things monday and tuesday. Lots of things will be in
a state a flux. Starting wed morning we can start looking at issues and
fixing them up.
Thanks for everyone's patience during this busy time!
misc other stuff
I've been of course doing other regular things, but my focus as been on datacenter
moving. Just one other thing to call out:
Finally we have our updated openh264 packages released for updates in stable
fedora releases. It was a long sad road, but hopefully now we can get things
done much much quicker. The entire thing wasn't just one thing going wrong or
blocking stuff, it was a long series of things, one after another. We are
in a much better state now moving forward though.
23 years ago I was in a bad place. I'd quit my first attempt at a PhD for various reasons that were, with hindsight, bad, and I was suddenly entirely aimless. I lucked into picking up a sysadmin role back at TCM where I'd spent a summer a year before, but that's not really what I wanted in my life. And then Hanna mentioned that her PhD supervisor was looking for someone familiar with Linux to work on making Dasher, one of the group's research projects, more usable on Linux. I jumped.
The timing was fortuitous. Sun were pumping money and developer effort into accessibility support, and the Inference Group had just received a grant from the Gatsy Foundation that involved working with the ACE Centre to provide additional accessibility support. And I was suddenly hacking on code that was largely ignored by most developers, supporting use cases that were irrelevant to most developers. Being in a relatively green field space sounds refreshing, until you realise that you're catering to actual humans who are potentially going to rely on your software to be able to communicate. That's somewhat focusing.
This was, uh, something of an on the job learning experience. I had to catch up with a lot of new technologies very quickly, but that wasn't the hard bit - what was difficult was realising I had to cater to people who were dealing with use cases that I had no experience of whatsoever. Dasher was extended to allow text entry into applications without needing to cut and paste. We added support for introspection of the current applications UI so menus could be exposed via the Dasher interface, allowing people to fly through menu hierarchies and pop open file dialogs. Text-to-speech was incorporated so people could rapidly enter sentences and have them spoke out loud.
But what sticks with me isn't the tech, or even the opportunities it gave me to meet other people working on the Linux desktop and forge friendships that still exist. It was the cases where I had the opportunity to work with people who could use Dasher as a tool to increase their ability to communicate with the outside world, whose lives were transformed for the better because of what we'd produced. Watching someone use your code and realising that you could write a three line patch that had a significant impact on the speed they could talk to other people is an incomparable experience. It's been decades and in many ways that was the most impact I've ever had as a developer.
I left after a year to work on fruitflies and get my PhD, and my career since then hasn't involved a lot of accessibility work. But it's stuck with me - every improvement in that space is something that has a direct impact on the quality of life of more people than you expect, but is also something that goes almost unrecognised. The people working on accessibility are heroes. They're making all the technology everyone else produces available to people who would otherwise be blocked from it. They deserve recognition, and they deserve a lot more support than they have.
But when we deal with technology, we deal with transitions. A lot of the Linux accessibility support depended on X11 behaviour that is now widely regarded as a set of misfeatures. It's not actually good to be able to inject arbitrary input into an arbitrary window, and it's not good to be able to arbitrarily scrape out its contents. X11 never had a model to permit this for accessibility tooling while blocking it for other code. Wayland does, but suffers from the surrounding infrastructure not being well developed yet. We're seeing that happen now, though - Gnome has been performing a great deal of work in this respect, and KDE is picking that up as well. There isn't a full correspondence between X11-based Linux accessibility support and Wayland, but for many users the Wayland accessibility infrastructure is already better than with X11.
That's going to continue improving, and it'll improve faster with broader support. We've somehow ended up with the bizarre politicisation of Wayland as being some sort of woke thing while X11 represents the Roman Empire or some such bullshit, but the reality is that there is no story for improving accessibility support under X11 and sticking to X11 is going to end up reducing the accessibility of a platform.
When you read anything about Linux accessibility, ask yourself whether you're reading something written by either a user of the accessibility features, or a developer of them. If they're neither, ask yourself why they actually care and what they're doing to make the future better.
The Linux Kernel source is too big to generate all tags for all files. I want only a subset of C files and the corresponding headers. Here is my first take at it. yes it is in python. The program is designed to be run from the root of the Linux Kernel tree.
#!/usr/bin/python3
import sys
from plumbum import local, FG
print("Hello, Tristate Area.")
sources = []
for file in sys.argv[1:]:
sources.append(file)
print("file = " + file)
with open(file) as cfile:
for line in cfile.readlines():
if line.startswith("#include"):
for part in line.split():
if part.startswith("<"):
header = part.replace("<","").replace(">","")
header = "include/" + header
sources.append(header)
sources =sorted(set(sources))
ctags = local['ctags']
print(ctags.bound_command(sources).formulate())
ctags.bound_command(sources) & FG
I get a file of size 155502. Running ctaginator I get a file of size 491157. Feels about right.
However, this does not include headers only included from other headers. To do that, we would need something recursive. That something would need cycle-breaking ability….
Release Candidate versions are available in the testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS / Alma / Rocky and other clones) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for parallel installation, the perfect solution for such tests, and as base packages.
RPMs of PHP version 8.4.9RC1 are available
as base packages in the remi-modular-test for Fedora 40-42 and Enterprise Linux≥ 8
as SCL in remi-test repository
RPMs of PHP version 8.3.23RC1 are available
as base packages in the remi-modular-test for Fedora 40-42 and Enterprise Linux≥ 8
as SCL in remi-test repository
ℹ️ The packages are available for x86_64 and aarch64.
ℹ️ PHP version 8.2 is now in security mode only, so no more RC will be released.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted here on the good old blog, I’ve been busy with life and work, however, that may change soon as the big 5 banks in Canada are now forcing everyone to a mandated RTO back in to downtown Toronto. I had to move out of the city some years back due to the cost of living crisis here so I may be out of a job come September.
Anyway, I started a new MacOS app in Swift called TurnTable which is written from scratch to try and copy the old spirit and simplicity of the original iTunes application. It doesn’t have anything fancy yet implemented but I just wrote it all today and am posting the source code of course up on my github. I will try to add more features to it over time when I get a free chance to do so!
This is the 132nd issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news.
NEWS
Installing nightly syslog-ng arm64 packages on a Raspberry Pi
Last week, I posted about running nightly syslog-ng container images on arm64. However, you can also install syslog-ng directly on the host (in my case, a Raspberry Pi 3), running the latest Raspberry OS.
Working with One Identity Cloud PAM Linux agent logs in syslog-ng
One Identity Cloud PAM is one of the latest security products by One Identity. It provides asset management as well as secure and monitored remote access for One Identity Cloud users to hosts on their local network. Last year, I showed you how collect One Identity Cloud PAM Network Agent log messages on Windows and create alerts when somebody connects to a host on your local network using PAM Essentials. This time, I will show you how to work with the Linux version of the Network Agent.
Testing the new syslog-ng wildcard-file() source options on Linux
Last year, syslog-ng 4.8.0 improved the wildcard-file() source on FreeBSD and MacOS. Version 4.9.0 will do the same for Linux by using inotify for file and directory monitoring, resulting in faster performance while using significantly less resources. This blog is a call for testing the new wildcard-file() source options before release.
It’s less than 2 weeks until the switch of fedoraproject to our new datacenter, so I thought I would provide a reminder and status update.
Currently we are still on track to switch to the new datacenter the week of June 30th. As mentioned in previous posts:
End users hopefully will not be affected (mirrorlists, docs, etc should all be up and working all the time)
Contributors should expect for applications and services to be down or not fully working on Monday the 30th and Tuesday the 1st. Contributors are advised to hold their work until later in the week and not report problems for those days as we work to migrate things.
Starting Wednesday the 2nd things should be up in the new datacenter and we will start fixing issues that are reported as we can do so.
We ask for your patience in the next few weeks as we setup to do a smooth transfer of resources.
I'm lucky enough to have a weird niche ISP available to me, so I'm paying $35 a month for around 600MBit symmetric data. Unfortunately they don't offer static IP addresses to residential customers, and nor do they allow multiple IP addresses per connection, and I'm the sort of person who'd like to run a bunch of stuff myself, so I've been looking for ways to manage this.
What I've ended up doing is renting a cheap VPS from a vendor that lets me add multiple IP addresses for minimal extra cost. The precise nature of the VPS isn't relevant - you just want a machine (it doesn't need much CPU, RAM, or storage) that has multiple world routeable IPv4 addresses associated with it and has no port blocks on incoming traffic. Ideally it's geographically local and peers with your ISP in order to reduce additional latency, but that's a nice to have rather than a requirement.
By setting that up you now have multiple real-world IP addresses that people can get to. How do we get them to the machine in your house you want to be accessible? First we need a connection between that machine and your VPS, and the easiest approach here is Wireguard. We only need a point-to-point link, nothing routable, and none of the IP addresses involved need to have anything to do with any of the rest of your network. So, on your local machine you want something like:
The addresses here are (other than the VPS address) arbitrary - but they do need to be consistent, otherwise Wireguard is going to be unhappy and your packets will not have a fun time. Bring that interface up with wg-quick and make sure the devices can ping each other. Hurrah! That's the easy bit.
Now you want packets from the outside world to get to your internal machine. Let's say the external IP address you're going to use for that machine is 321.985.520.309 and the wireguard address of your local system is 867.420.696.005. On the VPS, you're going to want to do:
Now, all incoming packets for 321.985.520.309 will be rewritten to head towards 867.420.696.005 instead (make sure you've set net.ipv4.ip_forward to 1 via sysctl!). Victory! Or is it? Well, no.
What we're doing here is rewriting the destination address of the packets so instead of heading to an address associated with the VPS, they're now going to head to your internal system over the Wireguard link. Which is then going to ignore them, because the AllowedIPs statement in the config only allows packets coming from your VPS, and these packets still have their original source IP. We could rewrite the source IP to match the VPS IP, but then you'd have no idea where any of these packets were coming from, and that sucks. Let's do something better. On the local machine, in the peer, let's update AllowedIps to 0.0.0.0/0 to permit packets form any source to appear over our Wireguard link. But if we bring the interface up now, it'll try to route all traffic over the Wireguard link, which isn't what we want. So we'll add table = off to the interface stanza of the config to disable that, and now we can bring the interface up without breaking everything but still allowing packets to reach us. However, we do still need to tell the kernel how to reach the remote VPN endpoint, which we can do with ip route add vpswgaddr dev wg0. Add this to the interface stanza as:
PostUp = ip route add vpswgaddr dev wg0 PreDown = ip route del vpswgaddr dev wg0
That's half the battle. The problem is that they're going to show up there with the source address still set to the original source IP, and your internal system is (because Linux) going to notice it has the ability to just send replies to the outside world via your ISP rather than via Wireguard and nothing is going to work. Thanks, Linux. Thinux.
But there's a way to solve this - policy routing. Linux allows you to have multiple separate routing tables, and define policy that controls which routing table will be used for a given packet. First, let's define a new table reference. On the local machine, edit /etc/iproute2/rt_tables and add a new entry that's something like:
1 wireguard
where "1" is just a standin for a number not otherwise used there. Now edit your wireguard config and replace table=off with table=wireguard - Wireguard will now update the wireguard routing table rather than the global one. Now all we need to do is to tell the kernel to push packets into the appropriate routing table - we can do that with ip rule add from localaddr lookup wireguard, which tells the kernel to take any packet coming from our Wireguard address and push it via the Wireguard routing table. Add that to your Wireguard interface config as:
PostUp = ip rule add from localaddr lookup wireguard PreDown = ip rule del from localaddr lookup wireguard and now your local system is effectively on the internet.
You can do this for multiple systems - just configure additional Wireguard interfaces on the VPS and make sure they're all listening on different ports. If your local IP changes then your local machines will end up reconnecting to the VPS, but to the outside world their accessible IP address will remain the same. It's like having a real IP without the pain of convincing your ISP to give it to you.
As of today, all Copr builder virtual machines are now being spawned from
bootc images, which is no small feat because the builder infrastructure
involves multiple architectures (x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le, s390x), multiple
clouds (Amazon AWS, IBM Cloud), and on-premise hypervisors. It scales up to
400 builders running simultaneously and peaking at
30k builds a day.
Before bootc
You can find some interesting history and previous numbers in Pavel’s article -
Fedora Copr farm of builders - status of July 2021. The part it
leaves out is how we used to generate the Copr builder images.
The process is documented in the
official Copr documentation. In a nutshell, it
involved manually spawning a VM from a fresh Fedora Cloud image,
running Ansible playbooks to provision it, and then using custom scripts to
upload the image to the right place. Because we need to build the images
natively, we had to follow this process for every architecture.
The easiest workflow was for x86_64 builders running on our own hypervisors. It
meant connecting to the hypervisor using SSH and running a custom
copr-image script from the praiskup/helpers
repository. While its usage looks innocent, internally it had to execute many
virt-sysprep commands. It also required some
guestfish hacks to modify cloud-init configuration inside
of the image so that it works outside of an actual cloud. Then, finally, using
the upload-qcow2-images script to upload the image into
libvirt.
The same exact workflow for ppc64le builders. However, internally it had a
special case uploading the image also to OSU OSL OpenStack.
For s390x builders, we don’t have a hypervisor where we could natively build the
image. Thus we needed to spawn a new VM in IBM Cloud and run
the previously mentioned copr-image script inside of it. Once
finished, we needed to upload the image to IBM Cloud. This is supposed to be
done using the ibmcloud tool, but the problem is that
it is not FOSS, and as such, it cannot be packaged for
Fedora. We don’t want to run random binaries from the internet, so we
containerized it.
At this point, only x86_64 and aarch64 images for Amazon AWS remain.
While not straightforward to create a new AMI from a local qcow2 image, it’s
quite easy to create an AMI from a running EC2 instance. That
was our strategy. Spawn a new instance from a fresh Fedora Cloud
image, provision it, and then create an AMI from it.
Current situation
I disliked exactly three aspects concerning the previous solution. It required a
lot of manual work, the process was different for every cloud and architecture,
and the bus factor was less than one.
Even though at this moment generating a fresh set of builder images still
requires about the same amount of manual work as before, there is a potential
for future automation. By switching to bootc and
Image Builder, we were able to offload some dirty work to them
while also unifying the process to follow the same steps for all architectures
and clouds (with minor caveats).
For Amazon AWS, we can utilize the image-builder upload feature which is
amazing. But for other clouds and hypervisors, we still need our custom
upload-qcow2-images and
quay.io/praiskup/ibmcloud-cli. If image-builder could
implement the missing support and enable uploading to all of them, that would be
a major win for us.
Future plans
My goal is simple, I want one-button deployment. Well, almost.
When a change is made to our Containerfile, or when triggered
manually, or periodically after a period of inactivity, I want the images to be
automatically built for all architectures and uploaded to all the necessary
places. Then seeing a list of image names and AMIs that I can either choose to
use or ignore.
The bootc-image-builder-action seems like the
perfect candidate, but the problem is that it cannot natively build images for
ppc64le and s390x.
SNThrailkill recommended GitLab Runners but
that would require us to maintain the runner VMs, which is annoying. Moreover,
there is a potential chicken-and-egg problem, meaning that if we break our
image, we might not be able to spawn a VM to build a new working image. We also
wouldn’t be able to use the existing GitHub action and would have to port it for
GitLab.
At this moment, our team is leaning towards Konflux and a tekton pipeline for
building images. Fedora Konflux instance is limited to x86_64 and aarch64, so we
would temporarily have to use an internal Red Hat instance which provides all
the architectures needed by us.
Many questions are yet to be answered. Is Konflux ready? Does the pipeline for
building images already exist? Does it support everything we need? Is it built
on top of image-builder so that we can use its upload feature?
Pitfalls along the way
Hopefully, this can help Image Builder and bootc
developers better understand their blind spots in the onboarding process, and
also prevent new users from repeating the same mistakes.
Before discovering that bootc exists, our original approach was to use
just Image Builder and its blueprints, and
automatize the process using Packit. There were several
problems. It was easy to build the image locally from our blueprint, but it
wasn’t possible to upload the same blueprint to be built in
a hosted Image Builder service. Additionally, I had several issues with the
Blueprint TOML format. The order of operations is pre-defined
(e.g. all users are always created before any packages are installed). There is
no escape hatch to run a custom command. And finally, it’s yet another
specification to learn. My recommendation? Just go with bootc.
Our main problem with bootc is the immutability of the filesystem. Can somebody
please help me understand whether the immutable filesystem is a fundamental
building block, a key piece of technology that enables bootable containers, or
whether it is an unrelated feature? If it is technologically possible, our team
would love to see officially supported mutable bootc base images. Currently, we
are going forward with a
hack to make the root filesystem transient.
One of the issues that probably stems out of the immutable filesystem is the
necessity to change the default location of the RPM database.
This hack is baked into the bootc base images and we needed to revert it because
it causes Mock to fail under some specific circumstances. This unfortunately
cost us many many hours of debugging.
The process of building system images is quite storage intensive in
/var/lib/containers and /run. To avoid running out of disk space on our
virtual machines, we had to
turn our swap partition into a data volume and mount the
problematic directories there. Not sure if there is something that
image-builder can do to make this a less of problem.
We build the system images natively on VMs of the same architecture that they
are targeted for, but then we fetch all of them to an x86_64 machine and upload
the images to the respective clouds from there. We discovered a
bug in cross-arch upload to AWS, which was promptly
confirmed and fixed by the image-builder team. Big
customer satisfaction right here.
We also struggled with setting up AWS permissions for the image-builder upload
command to work correctly. We tried running it, fixing the insufficient
permissions it complained about, running it again, and again, and so on. I
don’t recommend this approach. It turns out there is a
documentation page with instructions.
I hope this chapter doesn’t come across as too discouraging. In fact, we found
workarounds for all of our problems, and we are now happily using this in
production. So you can probably too.
LibreWolf یک مرورگر امن، حریمخصوصیمحور و متنباز است که بر پایه Firefox توسعه داده شده است. هدف اصلی این مرورگر، حذف ویژگیهایی است که ممکن است به حریم خصوصی کاربران آسیب بزنند یا دادههای آنها را به سرورهای خارجی ارسال کنند. LibreWolf برای کاربرانی طراحی شده که میخواهند تجربهای امنتر و بدون ردیابی در وب […]
When the noise of the DotCom boom became too loud for me to ignore, I finally left my role enabling mainframes and joined a consultancy focusing on Electronic Commerce with a skillset based on Java. I was pretty well prepared for this, as the Object Oriented approach I had learned in the Visual C++ world translated over fairly cleanly, and I had taken a Java transition course at UC Berkely extenstion. Thus, I moved two streets up, two streets over, to the overheated, noisy, open bay office if Fort Point Partners.
Fort Point was still such a young company that it had not even gotten the fortpoint.com domain name yet…that would happen in a few months. They already had a couple projects under their belts, but the big ones were just starting, and they were staffing up for them. I was hired to work on a project for the Culinary Institute of America (yes, the CIA) that was about recipe management as a way of selling high end ingredients for these recipes. The site was called “Tavolo,” after the Italian word for table, but with the accent on the second syllable.
Our Project Manager was Roger Kibbe, and our technical lead was Paul Duey. While these two guys are real characters, and it would be fun to try and describe the ups and downs of the project in dramatic terms, they are very real people who I bonded with during a fairly intense project, and have become life long friends. Suffice to say that we all learned and grew a lot during the year that the project developed.
OK, I will add that I was the person that exposed Roger to UML diagrams. His initial response was “What the hell is that?” But I think he got it pretty quickly.
I was actually a bit above average age for the team. Most of the engineers were right out of college, with maybe a year or two of professional experience. I didn’t have much more technical experience, just my two years at Walker Interactive, but I had spent 3 years in the Army after graduation. On the other hand, a few of the coders on the project had really learned their craft, and were well beyond me in productivity and thoughtfulness…it made for a really great learning environment.
We were Java based, but this was before Java Enterprise Edition, and we built on the most powerful platform of the day: ATG Dynamo. ATG had built a data-mapping technique based on the mapping of Java objects to database tables using the properties of those objects. This very much heralded what we would see with J2EE’s second go round with data mapping, and very much mapped how Hibernate would work in the future. However, ATG was learning that they needed to make tools for analysts, and they had changed their approach, using a dynamic mapping based on XML and HashMaps. These were called Repositories and their first foray into using them was in the personalization of the user experience. This part of the site fell to me.
I, of course, was arrogant and thought I could do everything, so I also horned in on Bill Noto’s piece, which was the back end integration with the AS400 machines…this very much looked like the kind of work I was doing back at Walker, and I thought I had something to offer. In retrospect, the leadership should have told me to stick to my lane, or switched me off the personalization work, as it turned out that the fast timeline of the project meant I was seriously behind.
I will also say that I messed up in the backend integration, in that I did not use the data mapping mechanism from ATG. For some reason, I ended up building my own, that probably looked like the early iterations of ATGs. I thought it was going to run outside of the app server, on its own machine. We ended up just running it alongside the existing one, and it was fine.
Getting back to the Repository API and the personalization, I found myself frustrated by the lack of type safety in building that code. It really was not as neat a fit as the data transfer object design from the rest of the site. I do remember writing some really bad code to work around that. In solving the problem of dynamic data query, it stopped supporting its basic use case.
But by far the biggest frustration, and I think I speak for all engineers on the project, was the amount of time you had to wait for the Dynamo app server to restart every time you made a change. I later learned that the biggest time chunk in the restart process was the re-indexing of the objects, and we should have turned that off, but that solution didn’t help us on Tavolo. This i
The restart problem continued to haunt us on follow on projects until we found a hack-work-around. The Pages were in a format called JHTML, a pre-cursor to Java Server Pages. JHTML was dynamically converted to Java when the page was first loaded. It turns out you could do full Java objects within these pages, and they would be dynamically re-created when the page was reloaded. This is a technique I have used on a few occasions in on JSPs after my time at Fort Point.
Possibly the biggest lesson learned from Tavolo is that everyone follows the pattern set by the leadership. The technical lead was dating a night nurse, and thus had little motivation to go home at the end of the day. He tended to start late and work until after midnight. This was the pattern for the whole team. Most of use were young, and didn’t have families, so it was fine, although it did mess with my Rock Climbing schedule. I think we all enjoyed (to some degree) the craziness of working until 4 in the morning, going home to sleep until noon, and the coming back the next day.
Until that point, I had been completely removed from the customer side of the business. With Fort Point’s approach, I found myself at in front of the customer a few times, both early on for the offsite planning, and as we progressed. This pattern would continue with other projects, as one aspect of consulting is that you often find yourself integrated into the customers work-force, either building something to hand over to them, or expanding something they did, or figuring out how to get things to work together. I also got to work with partners on the integration effort. All of this helped me to understand the process of software development and deployment much better than I had in the past.
Many years later, Fort Point was bought by Adobe, which is why www.fortpoint.com redirectes to Adobe’s site.
In an era where software testing, cross-platform development, and cyber hygiene are increasingly vital, virtual machines (VMs) have become indispensable. They offer a way to run entire operating systems—Windows, Linux, or even macOS—inside another OS environment, with no need to repartition disks, dual boot, or invest in additional hardware. Whether you’re a developer, a cybersecurity enthusiast, or just a curious power user, VMs are a sandbox of opportunity.
In a surprising move following its acquisition by Broadcom, VMware made Workstation Pro free for personal use in May 2024, turning the tides in a market dominated by open-source solutions like VirtualBox. This article explores VMware Workstation Pro in-depth, its use cases, performance, macOS compatibility, and viable alternatives.
Why Choose VMware Workstation Pro?
VMware Workstation Pro has long been a professional favorite. Its robust performance, feature-rich environment, and hardware-accelerated virtualization make it ideal for everything from software testing to enterprise development environments.
Historically priced at over $200/€200, it’s now available free of charge for personal use, while businesses still require a $120/year (€119/year) commercial license.
Key Advantages
Superior Performance: Unlike VirtualBox, VMware harnesses native virtualization features like Intel VT-x or AMD-V with greater efficiency.
Snapshots & Clones: Save and revert VM states easily for testing and rollback scenarios.
Hardware Compatibility: Better handling of USB passthrough, GPU acceleration, and networking modes (NAT, Bridge, Host-Only).
Seamless Integration: Drag and drop, shared clipboard, and folder sharing enhance productivity.
Cross-Platform Support: Native support on Windows and Linux; with some workarounds, you can also use VMs on macOS.
System Requirements
To run VMware Workstation Pro efficiently, make sure your host machine meets or exceeds the following specs:
Component
Minimum
Recommended
CPU
64-bit with VT-x or AMD-V
Intel Core i5 / Ryzen 5 or better
RAM
4 GB
8 GB or more
Disk Space
1.5 GB (software) + 10–50 GB per VM
SSD for optimal performance
Host OS
Windows 10/11 or modern Linux distros
Windows 11 Pro, Ubuntu 24.04
Graphics
Optional 3D acceleration
Dedicated GPU for development/testing
Tip: To enable virtualization, access your BIOS/UEFI (usually F2 or DEL during boot) and activate Intel VT-x or AMD-V.
Installing VMware Workstation Pro (Windows & Linux)
Launching a VM with VMware is straightforward yet powerful:
Quick Setup (Typical Mode)
Launch VMware and click “Create a New Virtual Machine.�
Choose “Typical (recommended)� to skip advanced configuration.
Attach an ISO file—download Windows from Microsoft or Linux from Ubuntu.
Optionally enter a product key for Windows or set up a username.
Assign a name and storage path for the VM.
Allocate resources:
2–4 GB RAM for Windows
1 GB RAM for Linux
20–40 GB disk space
Click Finish and start your virtual journey.
Run Windows, Linux and other virtual machines with VMware Workstation Pro for Windows and Linux or VMware Fusion for Mac, the industry standard desktop hypervisors.
Build and test nearly any app with the world’s leading desktop hypervisor app for Windows and Linux.
Optimizing VM Performance
Even on modest systems, VMware lets you squeeze more out of your virtual machines. Here’s how:
1. Tune Resource Allocation
Increase RAM and CPU cores—without starving the host.
Enable hardware-assisted virtualization in VM settings.
2. Enable VMware Tools
This set of drivers improves:
Video performance
Clipboard sharing
Time sync
File dragging and dropping
To install:
Go to VM > Install VMware Tools (the ISO is mounted automatically).
3. Configure Network Modes
NAT: Default and safe for most users.
Bridged: Lets the VM appear as a real machine on the local network.
Host-Only: Isolated network for safe testing.
4. Use Snapshots & Clones
Snapshots allow point-in-time backups. If something breaks, just roll back.
VM > Snapshot > Take Snapshot
You can even clone VMs for parallel testing.
macOS and Virtualization: The Legal and Technical Landscape
Running macOS as a Guest
By default, VMware does not support macOS guests unless you’re on a Mac using VMware Fusion. However, unofficial patches like the macOS Unlocker (used at your own risk) enable macOS installation on VMware Workstation for educational use.
You will need:
VMware Workstation Pro (on Windows or Linux)
macOS Unlocker (e.g., via GitHub: paolo-projects/auto-unlocker)
macOS installation ISO (legally obtained from Apple’s site)
Disclaimer: Installing macOS on non-Apple hardware violates Apple’s EULA and is not supported by VMware.
Running VMs on macOS
For Mac users, the counterpart is VMware Fusion—a polished, professional virtualization suite with native M1/M2 chip support as of version 13.
Test apps across different OSes without maintaining physical test devices.
2. Web Development
Run LAMP or MEAN stacks in isolated environments.
3. Cybersecurity
Use Kali Linux or Parrot OS to run penetration tests in a sandbox.
4. OS Experimentation
Try new Linux distros like Fedora or Arch without touching your main setup.
5. Legacy Software Support
Run Windows XP or 7 for apps that don’t support modern Windows.
6. Gaming Mods
Install niche game mods or utilities that could harm your primary OS.
Free Alternatives to VMware Workstation Pro
Though VMware is now free for personal use, it’s not the only option. Here are notable alternatives:
Tool
Pros
Cons
VirtualBox
Free, cross-platform, good community support
Slower performance, weaker 3D support
Hyper-V (Windows Pro)
Native, low overhead
Not user-friendly for beginners
GNOME Boxes (Linux)
Simple, great for quick tests
Limited features
UTM (macOS)
Native on M1/M2, runs VMs and emulators
UI not as advanced
Parallels Desktop (macOS)
Optimized for Mac
Paid only
Best Practices for Virtualization in 2025
Keep Host OS Updated
Virtualization exploits often target host kernels. Stay patched.
Use SSDs or NVMe Drives
VMs benefit enormously from fast read/write speeds.
Encrypt VMs
Use full-disk encryption inside the VM, especially for sensitive data.
Isolate Networks
Use Host-Only or NAT to prevent VMs from exposing your entire LAN.
Backup Snapshots
Keep copies of VM states for recovery. Use version control for code.
Final Thoughts
Virtualization has transitioned from a niche capability to a mainstream necessity. With Broadcom’s decision to make VMware Workstation Pro free for personal use, more users can now enjoy a professional-grade hypervisor without the cost barrier.
Whether you’re experimenting with Linux, testing risky software, or building a sandboxed dev environment, VMware offers a reliable, feature-rich, and now accessible platform. And with tools like Fusion for macOS, VirtualBox for the open-source crowd, or UTM for M-series Macs, there’s a virtual solution for everyone.
In a world trending toward cloud everything, the power to run isolated, fully offline virtual operating systems is a liberating option—especially when it doesn’t come with a monthly fee.
Another year, another Fedora contributor conference! This year, Flock to Fedora returned to Prague, Czechia. It’s a beautiful city and always worth taking a long walk around, which is what many of the conference attendees did the day before the conference started officially. Unfortunately, my flight didn’t get in until far too late to attend, but I’m told it was a good time.
Day One: The Dawn of a New Era
After going through the usual conference details, including reminders of the Code of Conduct and the ritual Sharing of the WiFI Password, Flock got into full swing. To start things off, we had the FPL Exchange. Once a frequent occurence, sometimes only a few short years apart, this year saw the passing of the torch from Matthew Miller who has held the position for over eleven years (also known as “roughly as long as all of his predecessors, combined”) to his successor Jef Spaleta.
In a deeply solemn ceremony… okay, I can’t say that with a straight face. Our new Fedora Project Leader made his entrance wearing a large hotdog costume, eliciting laughter and applause. Matthew then proceeded to anoint the new FPL by dubbing him with a large, Fedora Logo-shaped scepter. Our new JefPL gave a brief overview of his career and credentials and we got to know him a bit.
After that, the other members of FESCo and myself (except Michel Lind, who was unable to make it this year) settled in for a Q&A panel with the Fedora community as we do every year. Some years in the past, we’ve had difficulty filling an hour with questions, but this time was an exception. There were quite a few important topics on peoples’ minds this time around and so it was a lively discussion. In particular, the attendees wanted to know our stances on the use of generative AI in Fedora. I’ll briefly reiterate what I said in person and during my FESCo election interview this year: My stance is that AI should be used to help create choices. It should never be used to make decisions. I’ll go into that in greater detail in a future blog post.
After a brief refreshment break, the conference launched into a presentation on Forgejo (pronounced For-jay-oh, I discovered). The talk was given by a combination of Fedora and upstream developers, which was fantastic to see. That alone tells me that the right choice was made in selecting Forgejo for out Pagure replacement in Fedora. We got a bit of history around the early development and the fork from Gitea.
Next up was a talk I had been very excited for. The developers of Bazzite, a downstream Fedora Remix focused on video gaming, gave an excellent talk about the Bootc tools underpinning it and how Fedora provided them with a great platform to work with. Bazzite takes a lot of design cues from Valve Software’s SteamOS and is an excellent replacement OS for the sub-par Windows experience on some of the SteamDeck’s competitors, like the Asus Rog Ally series. It also works great on a desktop for gamers and I’ve recommended it to several friends and colleagues.
After lunch, I attended the Log Detective presentation, given by Tomas Tomecek and Jiri Podivin. (Full disclosure: this is the project I’m currently working on.) They talked about how we are developing a tool to help package maintainers quickly process the logs of build failures to save time and get fixes implemented rapidly. They made sure to note that Log Detective is available as part of the contribution pipeline for CentOS Stream now and support for Fedora is coming in the near future.
After that, I spent most of the remainder of the day involved in the “Hallway Track”. I sat down with quite a few Fedora Friends and colleagues to discuss Log Detective, AI in general and various other FESCo topics. I’ll freely admit that, after a long journey from the US that had only gotten in at 1am that day, I was quite jet-lagged and have only my notes to remember this part of the day. I went back to my room to grab a quick nap before heading out to dinner at a nearby Ukrainian restaurant with a few old friends.
That evening, Flock held a small social event at an unusual nearby pub. GEEKÁRNA was quite entertaining, with some impressive murals of science fiction, fantasy and videogame characters around the walls. Flock had its annual International Candy Swap event there, and I engaged in my annual tradition of exchanging book recommendations with Kevin Fenzi.
Day Two: To Serve Man
Despite my increasing exhaustion from jet lag, I found the second day of the conference to be exceedingly useful, though I again did not attend a high number of talks. One talk that I made a particular effort to attend was the Fedora Server Edition talk. I was quite interested to hear from Peter Boy and Emmanuel Seyman about the results of the Fedora Server user survey that they conducted over the past year. The big takeaway there was that a large percentage of Fedorans use Fedora Server as a “home lab server” and that this is a constituency that we are under-serving today.
After the session, I sat down with Peter, Emmanuel and Aleksandra Fedorova and we spent a long while discussing some things that we would like to see in this space. In particular, we suggested that we want to see more Cockpit extensions for installing and managing common services. In particular, what I pitched would be something like an “App Store” for server applications running in containers/quadlets, with Cockpit providing a simple configuration interface for it. In some ways, this was a resurrection of an old idea. Simplifying the install experience for popular home lab applications could be a good way to differentiate Fedora Server from the other Editions and bring some fresh interest to the project.
After lunch, I spent most of the early afternoon drafting a speech that I would be giving at the evening event, with some help from Aoife Moloney and a few others. As a result, I didn’t see many of the talks, though I did make sure to attend the Fedora Council AMA (Ask Me Anything) session.
The social event that evening was a boat cruise along the Vltava River, which offered some stunning views of the architecture of Prague. As part of this cruise, I also gave a speech to honor Matthew Miller’s time as Fedora Project Leader and wish him well on his next endeavors at Red Hat. Unfortunately, due to technical issues with the A/V system, the audio did not broadcast throughout the ship. We provided Matthew with a graduation cap and gown and Aoife bestowed upon him a rubber duck in lieu of a diploma.
Day Three: Work It!
The final day of the conference was filled with workshops and hacking sessions. I participated in three of these, all of which were extremely valuable.
The first workshop of the day was for Log Detective. Several of the attendees were interested in working with the project and we spent most of the session discussing the API, as well as collecting some feedback around recommendations to improve and secure it.
After lunch, I attended the Forgejo workshop. We had a lengthy (and at times, heated) discussion on how to replace our current Pagure implementation of dist-git with a Forgejo implementation. I spent a fair bit of the workshop advocating for using the migration to Forgejo as an opportunity to modernize our build pipeline, with a process built around merge requests, draft builds and CI pipelines. Not everyone was convinced, with a fair number of people arguing that we should just reimplement what we have today with Forgejo. We’ll see how things go a little further down the line, I suppose.
The last workshop of the day was a session that Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek and I ran on eliminating RPM scriptlets from packages. In an effort to simplify life for Image Mode and virtualization (as well as keep updates more deterministic), Zbigniew and I have been on a multi-year campaign to remove all scriptlets from Fedora’s shipped RPMs. Our efforts have borne fruit and we are now finally nearing the end of our journey. Zbigniew presented on how systemd and RPM now has native support for creating users and groups, which was one of the last big usages of scriptlets. In this workshop, we solicited help and suggestions on how to clean up the remaining ones, such as the use of the alternatives system and updates for SELinux policies. Hopefully by next Flock, we’ll be able to announce that we’re finished!
With the end of that session came the end of Flock. We packed up our things and I headed off to dinner with several of the Fedora QA folks, then headed back to my room to sleep and depart for the US in the morning. I’d call it time well spent, though in the future I think I’ll plan to arrive a day earlier so I’m not so tired on the first day of sessions.
تیم Rocky Linux با خوشحالی اعلام کرد که نسخهی Rocky Linux 10.0 بهصورت GA (General Availability) در دسترس قرار گرفته است. تصاویر (image/iso) جدید نصب، کانتینر، کلاد و live آمادهی دانلود هستند. ️ تغییرات مهم پشتیبانی از معماریهای جدید: اکنون نسخه ۱۰ فقط از معماریهای x86-64-v3، ARM (aarch64)، RISC‑V (riscv64)، IBM POWER (ppc64le) و IBM […]
The All Systems Go! 2025 Call for Participation Closes Tomorrow!
The Call for Participation (CFP) for All Systems Go!
2025 will close tomorrow, on 13th of
June! We’d like to invite you to submit your proposals for
consideration to the CFP submission
site quickly!
Dans le cadre des 20 ans de Fedora-fr (et du Projet Fedora en lui-même), Charles-Antoine Couret (Renault) et Nicolas Berrehouc (Nicosss) avons souhaité poser des questions à des contributeurs francophones du Projet Fedora et de Fedora-fr.
Grâce à la diversité des profils, cela permet de voir le fonctionnement du Projet Fedora sous différents angles pour voir le projet au delà de la distribution mais aussi comment il est organisé et conçu. Notons que sur certains points, certaines remarques restent d'application pour d'autres distributions.
N'oublions pas que le Projet Fedora reste un projet mondial et un travail d'équipe ce que ces entretiens ne permettent pas forcément de refléter. Mais la communauté francophone a de la chance d'avoir suffisamment de contributeurs de qualité pour permettre d'avoir un aperçu de beaucoup de sous projets de la distribution.
L'entretien du jour concerne Jean-Baptiste Holcroft, un des mainteneurs de la traduction française de Fedora.
Entretien
Bonjour Jean-Baptiste, peux-tu présenter brièvement tes contributions au projet Fedora ?
Gêné par des traductions partielles de logiciels que je trouve super, j'ai aidé d'abords en signalant des problèmes, puis en traduisant, et ne voyant pas les traductions arriver, à fluidifier le processus de traduction.
Ayant compris le fonctionnement, grâce à la communauté, j'ai voulu aider cette communauté à être plus efficace, en migrant sur la très bonne plateforme de traduction Weblate, en permettant la traduction de la totalité de la documentation de Fedora (on parle ici de 3,5 millions de mots, de milliers de pages).
Transifex, la plateforme précédente, ne permettait pas un travail collectif efficace (entre les traducteurices et entre traducteurices-projets de développement).
Avec l'expérience, j'ai constaté que la communauté du logiciel libre propose une expérience désastreuse pour les traducteurs, le coût de traduction vs l'effort nécessaire pour traduire tout un système d'exploitation est monstrueux, j'ai maintenant voulu rendre cela perceptible et accessible à tous (ce site est moche, sa valeur est la mesure de traduction transverse).
Qu'est-ce qui fait que tu es venu sur Fedora et que tu y es resté ?
Fedora accueille les contributeurs, leur permet de gagner en responsabilité, de financer des initiatives et de grandir en tant que personne. Si mon implication varie dans le temps, ce n'est qu'une question de temps disponible.
Pourquoi contribuer à Fedora en particulier ?
La ligne est claire, au plus proche des créateurs de logiciels libre, en collaboration, que du logiciel libre et très fiable.
C'est une mentalité que je trouve excellente et dans laquelle je me sens à l'aise.
Contribues-tu à d'autres Logiciels Libres ? Si oui, lesquels et comment ?
J'ai contribué pendant quelques temps au projet YunoHost sur les thèmes de la traduction, de l'internationalisation et de l'empaquetage de logiciels.
Ce projet est mature et autonome sur ces deux sujets, ayant moins de temps, j'ai arrêté d'y contribuer.
Je continue à l'utiliser au quotidien car je le considère aussi stable que Fedora pour gérer mon serveur personnel avec mes emails, mes fichiers, mes contacts, etc.
Aujourd'hui, je m'intérresse plutôt à notre efficacité collective plutôt qu'un projet en particulier.
Est-ce que tes contributions à Fedora sont un atout direct ou indirect dans ta vie professionnelle ? Si oui, de quelle façon ?
Toute la culture technique gagnée en lisant l'actualité des projets, en contribuant via des rapports de bugs, des traductions, des développements m'ont aidé pour obtenir mon emploi actuel, et pour mon travail au quotidien.
Le logiciel libre et le fait d'y contribuer, même modestement est un lien réel, concret et palpable, très loin de l'informatique fantasmée qui ne fait le bonheur que du porte-monnaie et du pouvoir des puissants.
Dans le travail, qu'il soit lucratif, amical ou militant, je veux du concret qui nous aide à avancer, et c'est une valeur très forte du logiciel libre.
Tu as maintenu la traduction française de Fedora pendant des années, peux-tu nous expliquer l'importance de la traduction et même de l'internationalisation dans ce genre de projets ?
Le logiciel libre est un outil de lutte contre l'appropriation des communs par une minorité.
Si on veut qu'il soit un outil d'émancipation des masse, on veut réduire les barrières à l'utilisation, tout en respectant les singularités de ses utilisateurs et utilisatrices.
Un utilisateur de logiciel ne devrait pas avoir à apprendre une nouvelle langue pour utiliser un outil émmancipateur et respectueux, d'où l'intérêt de ces activités.
Traduire un logiciel est une activité complexe, quelles sont les difficultés rencontrées lors de cette activité ?
Traduire est la partie facile, ça consomme très peu de temps, ce qui est compliqué c'est :
savoir où traduire - trouver quel logiciel affiche la chaîne, trouver où il est hébergé, comprendre quelle version est à traduire, etc
demander de pouvoir traduire un logiciel - tout n'est pas traduisible, notre pouvoir pour faire évoluer ça en tant que traducteurice est faible
comprendre comment traduire - l'idéal c'est Weblate directement lié au dépôt de logiciel du dépôt, le pire c'est l'ouverture de Pull Request
maintenir les traductions dans le temps - pour chaque projet
Tu as participé à la migration de la plateforme de traduction Zanata vers Weblate, peux-tu revenir sur cette tâche et les motivations derrière cette décision ?
Weblate est un outil de traduction performant, qui facilite la vie des créateurices de logiciels et des traducteurices. Cet outil est proche du dépôt de code source et permet beaucoup d'autonomie aux traducteurices pour s'organiser comme iels le souhaitent, tracer les modifications, être notifiés, etc.
Zanata, ben c'était un objet ok pour traduire, mais c'est tout, tout le reste était déficient.
A titre d'illustration, pour savoir si une traduction a été modifiée, je devais aller regarder sur chaque phrase l'historique des modifications.
Sur Weblate, l'historique est transparent et efficace, et permet de filtrer par langue, projet, composants et type de changements. Voici par exemple l'historique des changements de traduction en Français sur tous les projets.
Quand Weblate est arrivé, j'ai activement démontré la pertinence de ce projet et poussé le sujet pour que nous soyons plus efficaces.
Tu as également participé à obtenir des statistiques de traduction au sein du projet Fedora, quel intérêt à cela et comment cela a été mis en œuvre ?
C'est un sujet génial, mais c'est légèrement compliqué, voici une simplification :
Une distribution Linux, c'est l'assemblage de milliers de logiciels, des lignes de code contenues dans les paquets.
Chaque paquet est disponible au téléchargement sur des mirroirs, on y retrouve même les paquets d'il y a plusieurs années (j'arrive à exploiter les données jusqu'à Fedora 7 sortie en mai 2007).
En suivant de près le fonctionnement de Weblate, je me suis rendu compte que le créateur de Weblate a créé des petits outils pour : avoir des listes de tous les codes de langues connus, et d'auto-détection des fichiers de traduction.
La mécanique va donc :
télécharger chaque paquet existant dans Fedora
en extraire le code source
lancer l'auto-détection des fichiers de traduction
calculer pour chaque fichier le pourcentage d'avancement
agréger les résultats par langue grâce aux codes connus
puis générer un site web pour afficher les résultats
Avec mon ordinateur, cela m'a pris plus de dix jours de calcul en continu, et le téléchargement de 2 To de données pour réussir à avoir une vue sur plus de 15 ans de la distribution Fedora. Je n'ai malheureusement pas encore eu le temps d'en faire une rétrospective pertinente dans le cadre d'une conférence, faute de temps pour analyser les données. Pour l'instant, la seule partie visible est le site https://languages.fedoraproject.org. J'espère avancer sur ce sujet pour la rencontre annuelle 2025 du projet Fedora et le FOSDEM 2026.
La traduction est une activité spécifique pour chaque langue mais tout le monde a des problèmes communs vis à vis de l'outillage ou des situations complexes, y a-t-il des collaborations entre les différentes équipes de traduction dans Fedora ?
D'une façon générale, résoudre un problème pour une langue résous systématiquement un problème pour une autre langue.
Les traducteurs et traductrices se soutiennent beaucoup notamment pour ces raisons, soutenez-les vous aussi !
L'absence de centralisation dans cette activité rend la cohérence des traductions dans l'ensemble des logiciels libres très complexe. Peux-tu nous expliquer ces difficultés ? Est-ce qu'il y a une volonté francophone notamment d'essayer de résoudre le problème en collaborant ensemble d'une certaine façon sur ces problématiques ?
Un logiciel est une création, sa communauté peut être plus ou moins inclusive et pointue sur certaines traductions.
La cohérence vient avec les usages et évolue comme la langue de façon progressive et délocalisée.
On pourrait imaginer proposer des outils, mais si c'est un sujet très important, ce n'est pour l'instant pas mon combat.
Je vois ça comme un problème de privilégié, car spécifique aux langues ayant suffisamment de traduction, alors que la quasi totalité des langues en ont très peu et sont incapables de tenir le rythme exigé par l'évolution de nos logiciels libres.
Je voudrais d'abord démontrer et faire acter à la communauté du logiciel libre qu'il y a urgence à améliorer notre efficacité avec des changements de processus et de l'outillage. Cet outillage pourrait sûrement permettre d'améliorer la cohérence.
Fedora n'est sans doute pas le projet le plus avancé sur la question de l'internationalisation malgré ses progrès au fil des ans, qu'est-ce que le projet Fedora pourrait faire à ce sujet pour améliorer la situation ?
Si on veut faciliter la vie des traducteurices, il faudrait envisager de permettre de traduire à l'échelle de Fedora, de façon distincte des traductions de chaque projet, comme le fait Ubuntu.
Le problème, c'est qu'Ubuntu utilise des outils médiocres (Launchpad) et n'a pas de moyen automatiser pour renvoyer ce travail aux créateurs de logiciels.
Fedora pourrait innover sur ce sujet, et réussir à faire les deux avec une bonne plateforme de traduction (Weblate) et beaucoup d'outillage pour partager ce travail avec les différentes communauté, les utilisateurices y gagneraient en confort, les traducteurices en efficacité et les projets en contributions.
Quelque chose à ajouter ?
Un grand merci à la communauté francophone de Fedora, à la communauté Fedora et à l'ensemble des communautés qui collaborent tous les jours pour nous permettre d'avoir des outils émancipateurs et qui nous respectent. Le travail réalisé au quotidien est exceptionnellement utile et précieux, merci, merci et merci.
Gardons à l'esprit que le logiciel n'est qu'un outil au service d'autres luttes dans lesquelles nous devons prendre notre part.
Merci Jean-Baptiste pour ta contribution !
Conclusion
Nous espérons que cet entretien vous a permis d'en découvrir un peu plus sur le site Fedora-fr.
Si vous avez des questions ou que vous souhaitez participer au Projet Fedora ou Fedora-fr, ou simplement l'utiliser et l'installer sur votre machine, n'hésitez pas à en discuter avec nous en commentaire ou sur le forum Fedora-fr.
À dans 10 jours pour un entretien avec Nicolas Berrehouc, contributeur de Fedora-fr et mainteneur de sa documentation.
The Vulkan WG has released VK_KHR_video_decode_vp9. I did initial work on a Mesa extensions for this a good while back, and I've updated the radv code with help from AMD and Igalia to the final specification.
There is an open MR[1] for radv to add support for vp9 decoding on navi10+ with the latest firmware images in linux-firmware. It is currently passing all VK-GL-CTS tests for VP9 decode.
Adding this decode extension is a big milestone for me as I think it now covers all the reasons I originally got involved in Vulkan Video as signed off, there is still lots to do and I'll stay involved, but it's been great to see the contributions from others and how there is a bit of Vulkan Video community upstream in Mesa.
Just got home yesterday from Flock to Fedora 2025 edition and
I'm going to try and write up my thoughts before I get busy and
forget everything. Do note that this is likely to be a long post.
Flock is always a great conference and this year was no exception.
This time I was very busy and distracted by the upcoming Datacenter
move, so I didn't anticipate it as much as I usually do, but it
sure was great once I got there. I'm an introvert by nature, and
the prospect of being "on" and engaging with the world and all the people
at the conference should drain me, but flock somehow manages to
leave me energized (in mind / feelings at least) if exhausted in body.
Day -2 (monday 2025-06-02)
My travels started on Monday the 2nd. I got up early, grabbed a cup of
coffee and checked in on things before heading for the airport.
It's a great thing I did as I managed to block some scrapers that
were causing the python mass rebuild to go very very slowly.
Pesky scrapers. Then 2 hour drive to the airport in Portland.
Some traffic, but no real delays. Then a quick bite to eat and
my first flight: PDX to AMS. It's about a 9 hour flight, which is
pretty crazy, but I definitely like it better than more smaller
hops. There's less to go wrong.
As a side note, I cannot stress to others enough how much noise
canceling headphones really make plane flights more bearable.
They cut off the nasty drone of the engines/wind and make it vastly
less painfull. I wore my headphones with noise canceling on
all the time, even when I wasn't listening to anything.
On these long flights I can't really sleep, so I like to read
ebooks and catch up on podcasts. This flight I listened to some
great song exploder episodes ( "our house" and "everybody wants to
rule the world") and some radiolab and others.
Then arrival in AMS. I only had a 1.5 hour layover, which it turned out
was just perfectly timed. I managed to get through the customs line
and to the new gate just before they started boarding for Pague.
They did make me check my bag here because the flight was so full,
but that was fine.
Day -1 (tuesday 2025-06-03)
Got into Prague, got my bag and got a uber to the hotel.
The hotel checkin was not until 3pm according to their website
but they managed to already have my room ready, so I was able
to check in and decompress.
I then met Carl and Noel at a resturant nearby for a nice lunch.
We chatted on all kinds of topics.
Back to the hotel to relax a bit. I was determined to try and stay
up and go to sleep later so my schedule would shift, but then I
decided to just lay down for a few minutes and bam! I did wake up
around 8pm local time and went back to bed, and I did wake up
early, but that was after getting a lot of sleep.
Day 0 (wed 2025-06-04)
I met up with tons of folks at breakfast at the hotel and
we went over to the venue. The hotel I was staying at was about
1.5 blocks from the venue hotel, it worked out just fine.
Some of us went to a outside air food court place for lunch.
It was nice. I had some tacos and we had some more conversations
at the lunch table.
The afternoon I went to a meetup between fesco and council members
that were present. I think there was some productive discussion there.
There were a lot of suggestions on how fesco and the council could
communicate more and how the council could communicate better with
the communty and what sort of workflows might make sense. I think it
mostly resulted in some council action items, but also on the fesco
side more communication to the council on difficult topics.
After that I was off to the sponsor dinner. This is a dinner with
folks from the groups/companies that sponsored flock along with fesco
and council members. This time it was at a lovely resturant that
was a 600+ year old underground wine cellar! https://www.napekle.cz/en/
The food was great and the conversations were also... great!
Back to the hotel and in bed around midnight.
Day 1 (thursday 2025-06-05)
Flock begins!
We had opening remarks and handoff of the Fedora Project Leader baton
(wand? septere? curling boom?). I was hit by how long I have been around
this community. I met Jef back in the fedora.us/fedora-extras days, almost
20 years ago now, and Matthew showing a picture of his kids when he first
became FPL and now and how much they had grown. We are all getting older
and we really need to bring in new folks to carry the fedora foundations
forward.
Then, right after that was the 'meet your FESCo' panel. We didn't have all
FESCo members present, but a good many of them. We did a quick introduction
and then took questions from the audience. I'm glad Peter was there and asked
about the provenpackager stuff from eariler this year. I hope answers were
helpfull. There were questions all over the place, new arches, ai, workflows,
provenpackagers, etc. Do view the video if you are interested.
Next I had planned to go to the forgejo talk, but then... as with so many
times in this flock, I got in discussions in the 'hallway track' with people
and wasn't able to make it there in time. :( I hope to catch the recording
(along with many other talks).
Then lunch at the venue, but this time I signed up for the mentor/metee lunch
matching. There was only 3 of us at the Infra/Releng table, but we had a great time
I thought. I was happy to share what I could, and Justin and Hristo had a lot
of good perspectives. I hope I helped them out, and I know they gave me
things to think about. Overall it was very nice. It might have been better
with more people, but I'd definitely sign up for this again at another flock.
After lunch I spent a lot of time in the hallway track talking to folks.
One super great surprise was that Toshio was there! I got to chat with him
a bunch over flock and it was so nice to see him again. Later the next day
another person I hadn't seen in a while appeared too: Vipul! I hadn't been
too much in touch with him since he moved to a new job at the UN, but it was
super great to see him as well (even though I did not recognize him at first with
his new glasses!).
It would likely be too hard to list all the people I talked to about all the
things I talked to them about but some themes became clear:
There was a lot of talk about AI. Yes, the usual funny stores about how
AI got it wrong or was used in a stupid way, but also a lot of 'how can we
leverage this stuff in a resonable way and how can we make AI more in fitting
with our foundations'.
A lot of discussion about community building, communication and bringing
in new contributors.
I did mange to get to Greg's talk on "Build it and they will come" and other myths.
Some great stuff there around community building. I particularly liked
some of the examples, which showed things we do wrong all the time.
Things to think about and leverage.
Then, thursday night we had a CLE dinner for all the members of my team
in Red Hat. It turned out to be at the same place we went for lunch on
tuesday, but thats fine. It was good. Some good converations there where I
got to chat with Julia and Patrik (although it was kind of loud there,
so it was hard hearing anything).
After that some of us rushed off to the Candy Swap. Always a fun event.
This time it wasn't at the venue, but instead at a 'games cafe'. They had
a full bar there and a bunch of games. It was kind of small, but it worked
out ok for our crowd. After the candy swap I got to chat with Stephen about
books and movies. We always catch up this way and share nice books we have read.
We were joined by Peter and Troy too, so I have a list of books to look up
now.
Day 2 (Friday 2025-06-06)
Friday came too early after too little sleep.
I went to the 'what about a better dist-git' talk. Some nice information there,
but I think I knew much of it before. There were some good questions starting,
but I got pulled out to the hallway track, so I will need to look back at those.
Some more hallway discussions and then off to the "One year in: Microsoft
as a Fedora Contributor" talk by Bex. It was great to see the parts of the project
that microsoft folks are contributing to, I don't think many people realize it,
so it was great to get some visibility to their efforts. I'm personally very
happy that Jeremy has been helping out with our signing infra and cloud uploads.
Thats really important stuff that we didn't have anyone to drive forward until
he was able to do so.
I really planned to go to the Fedora Server talk next, but then again I got
into discussions in the hallway until I had missed it. :(
After lunch I went to some lightning talks. This was a last minute thing as
the speaker in that slot was not able to be there, but wow... fedora contributors
are always ready with talks a the drop of a fedora. I really liked Emma's
presentation about design. It's not something developers think about or
realize, but we should! Lots of other great ones too!
I went to Greg's discourse tips and tricks. Learned a few things, but I would
definitely recommend people who aren't up on discourse to watch the recording.
It will help you out getting started!
Then more hallway and the Fedora Council AMA. There were some good questions here
and some good discussions about various council related topics. I probibly need
to watch the recording even thought I was there because I was tired after a long
day.
There was there some short closing remarks (even though there would be workshops
the following day) from Justin. he thanked all the folks who helped make flock happen
and gave info on the evening event and workshops the next day. There was one
thing missing however: We should have all thanked Justin! I know flock is a massive
undertaking, and I am sure there were issues I have no idea about, but from my
side flock was a great success! Thank you Justin!
The evening event was a boat ride with dinner. We did this same event last time
flock was in pague. It was fun then and again now. I had Troy and Evan and Jens at
my dinner table and we had a bunch of great discussion about shirts, travel,
home assistant, people we all knew and more. Then after dinner everyone mingled
on the top deck until they kicked us off the boat around 10pm.
A group of us then went to a beer place near the hotel for a few more beers.
Some more talk there about... lots of things. I managed to get back and in
bed around midnight (thats the theme).
Day 3 (Saturday 2025-06-07)
The last day was workshops and breakouts.
I went to the start of the initial setup hackfest, but I knew much of the information
that they were going over, so I allowed myself to be pulled into the hallway
again.
After lunch, I went to the distgit implementation in forgejo talk. There was some
good discussion about workflows and how things could work. We did get a bit off topic
I think with talking about provenpackagers, but I guess it's all related.
I'm really looking forward to us using forgejo here.
I did go to Aurélien's improve fedora infra applications, but again I kind of
knew the background here, so I got pulled off into some other things:
I had a (I hope) nice talk with Peter about server setup and deliverables.
I do owe him some more docs/info on one part of it I could not happen to recall, but
hopefully this gives him info he needs to work on the server deliverables some more.
A talk with a few folks about plans for handling the matrix spam issues. We came up
with some proposed short term and longer term plans. Look for plans asking for
feedback in the coming weeks. We really need to get things workable there.
A nice talk with the person who actually started the opensuse foundation.
He was there looking to see if it would be useful to start a fedora one.
I don't know the answer, but It sounded very interesting.
Got to catch up on ARM stuff with Peter (another one). Always great to talk to him
and hopefully we can find some ways forward for the x1e / snapdragon laptops
sooner rather than later.
The new FPL, Jef. I was in several conversations with him. He seemed to be keeping
afloat with all the stuff going on, which I thought was amazing. I'm sure he will be
a great FPL.
Some good discussions with Greg. He's on my team at Red Hat and working with
myself and Fabian on infra, so we were able to have a few higher bandwith
discussions that should help us in the coming weeks.
Got to catch up a bit with Fabian on a bunch of topics.
Had a few nice discussions with Brendan (my grand boss).
After things closed out a bunch of us went to a Dim Sum place nearby for dinner.
More books discussion, along with travels and interesting places.
I went back to the hotel and crashed before 9am, which was good, because
my flight to AMS was at 6am the next day.
Day 4 (Sunday 2025-06-08)
Travel back home. Got a cab with Brendan at 4am, got to the airport, through
security and onto my first flight in time at 6am. Then, in AMS, walking accross
the airport, grabbed a quick breakfast and got to the terminal in time to get
on my AMS to PDX flight. On the way back my usual podcast and books didn't work
because I was so sleepy. It was hard to pay attention. So, instead I watched a
few movies: the new marvel captain america one and the second dune movie. Both
were ok, but nothing super amazing. My flight from AMS left at 10am, and arrived
in PDX at 11am the same day, but it was definitely not a 1 hour flight.
I was worried about customs coming back to the US, but it turned out
that they just asked me if I had any food, I said nope, they said ok.
Then the 2 hour drive home. I was pretty sleepy at this point, but I got some
cafene and was able to make it home fine finally. There was a lot of
stop and go traffic this time, which was anoying, so the drive took
an extra hour or so.
Health and diet
I'm going to digress here about heath, diet and conferences, so if that
doesn't interest you, feel free to skip it.
I gained weight on this trip, and thats unfortunately pretty usual.
I think there's several reasons for this. If you are traveling you may
not have much choice of food, or might not know when next you will get food.
Breakfast is often included in hotels, and it's almost always a 'all you can eat'
buffet type thing. I can eat a lot.
But also, conferences always seem to put food in front of you, and I am
pretty bad about just eating food if it's there. I don't want it to go to
waste, and it's something I do as a background.
Of course the simple answer is to just have more willpower and eat smaller
amounts, but it's not simple to do that sometimes. I don't know if there's
much that could be done from a conference point of view. I guess less food
with coffee/tea/water breaks? Or moving away from buffets?
Anyhow, something to think about.
Matrix spam
The horrific matrix spam ramped up before flock and measures were put into place
that blocked it. Some of those measures are pretty heavy handed, but we really
did not want to have to handle this junk at flock. As I mentioned above we did
some up with some plans, and I hope we can make things still safe but more open soon.
Flock to Fedora is my favorite conference and this year was no
exception.
Too many good presentations and workshops to name them all. But I want to
mention at least the most surprising (in a good way) ones. It takes some courage
to be the first person to go for a lightning talk, especially when lightning
talks aren’t even scheduled and organizers open the floor at the very
moment. Smera, I tip my hat to you. Also, I was meaning to ask,
how do graphic designers choose the FOSS project they want to work on? As an
engineer, I typically get involved in sofware that I use but is broken somehow,
or is missing some features. I am curious what is it like for you. Another
pleasant surprise was Marta and her efforts to
replace grub with nmbl. I will definitely try having no more
boot loader. In a VM though, I’d still like to boot my workstation :D.
Something happened to me repeatedly during this conference and amused me every
time. I introduced myself to a person, we talked for five minutes, and then the
person asked “so what do you do in Fedora?”. I introduced myself once more, by
my nickname. To which the immediate reaction was “Ahaaa, now I know exactly what
you do!”. I am still laughing about this. Organizers, please bring back FAS
usernames on badges.
It was nice to hear Copr casually mentioned in every other
presentation. It makes the work that much more rewarding.
My favorite presentation was
Bootable Containers: Moving From Concept to Implementation.
I’ve spent all my free time over the last couple of months trying to create a
bootc image for Copr builders, and seeing
Sean falling into and crawling out of all the same traps as
myself was just cathartic. We later talked in the hallway and I appreciated how
quickly he matched my enthusiasm about the project. He gave me some valuable
advice regarding CI/CD for the system images. Man, now I am even more hyped.
I learned about Fedora Ready, an amazing initiative to partner
with laptop vendors and provide a list of devices that
officially support Fedora. Slimbook loves Fedora so much that they
even offer a laptop with Fedora engravings. How amazing would
it be if my employer provided this option for a company laptop? What surprised
me, was not seeing System76 on the list. I am a fan of theirs, so I
am considering reaching out.
Feeling a tap on your shoulder 30 seconds after you push a commit is never a
good sign. When you turn around, Karolina is looking into your eyes
and saying that f’d up, you immediately know that push was a bad idea. For a
petite lady, she can be quite terrifying :D. I am exaggerating for effect. We
had a nice chat afterward and I pitched an idea for an RPM macro that would
remove capped versions from Poetry dependencies. That should make our
lives easier, no?
One of my favorite moments this year was chilling out with Zbigniew
on a boat deck, cruising the Vltava River, and watching the sunset over the
beautiful city of Prague. Kinda romatic if you ask me. Just joking, but indeed,
it was my pleasure to get to know you Zbigniew.
The JefFPL exchange
The conference began with a bittersweet moment - the passing of the Fedora
Project Leadership mantle from Matthew Miller to
Jeff Spaleta.
I didn’t know Jeff before, probably because he was busy doing really effin cool
stuff in Alaska, but we had an opportunity to chat in the hallway after the
session. He is friendly, well-spoken, and not being afraid to state his
opinions. Good qualities for a leader. That being said, Matthew left giant shoes
to fill, so I think it is reasonable not to be overly enthusiastic about the
change just yet.
Matthew, best wishes in your next position, but at the same time, we are sad to
see you go.
FESCo and Fedora Council
The FESCo Q&A and the Fedora Council AMA were
two different sessions on two different days, but I am lumping them together
here. Both of them dealt with an
unspecified Proven Packager incident, the lack of communication
surrounding it, and the inevitable loss of trust as a consequence.
I respectfully disagree with this sentiment.
Let’s assume FESCo actions were wrong. So what? I mean,
really. Everybody makes mistakes. I wrote bugfixes that introduced twice as many
new bugs, I accidentally removed data in production, and I am regularly wrong in
my PR comments. Yet I wasn’t fired, demoted, or lost any trust from the
community. Everybody makes mistakes, it’s par for the course. Even ifFESCo made a mistake (I am not in the position to judge whether they
did or not), it would not overshadow the majority of decisions they made
right. They didn’t lose any of my trust.
As for the policies governing Proven Packagers, one incident
in a decade does not necessarily imply that new rules are needed. It’s possible
to just make a gentlemen’s agreement, shake hands, and move on.
That being said, I wanted to propose the same thing as
Alexandra Fedorova. Proven Packagers are valuable in emergencies,
and I think, it is a bad idea to disband them. But requiring +1 from at least
one other person before pushing changes, makes sense to me. Alexandra proposed
+1 from at least one other Proven Packager, but I would broaden the eligible
reviewers to also include Packager Sponsors and
FESCo members. I would also suggest requiring the name of the reviewer
to be clearly mentioned in the commit description.
As I wrote in my last post, Twitter's new encrypted DM infrastructure is pretty awful. But the amount of work required to make it somewhat better isn't large.
When Juicebox is used with HSMs, it supports encrypting the communication between the client and the backend. This is handled by generating a unique keypair for each HSM. The public key is provided to the client, while the private key remains within the HSM. Even if you can see the traffic sent to the HSM, it's encrypted using the Noise protocol and so the user's encrypted secret data can't be retrieved.
But this is only useful if you know that the public key corresponds to a private key in the HSM! Right now there's no way to know this, but there's worse - the client doesn't have the public key built into it, it's supplied as a response to an API request made to Twitter's servers. Even if the current keys are associated with the HSMs, Twitter could swap them out with ones that aren't, terminate the encrypted connection at their endpoint, and then fake your query to the HSM and get the encrypted data that way. Worse, this could be done for specific targeted users, without any indication to the user that this has happened, making it almost impossible to detect in general.
This is at least partially fixable. Twitter could prove to a third party that their Juicebox keys were generated in an HSM, and the key material could be moved into clients. This makes attacking individual users more difficult (the backdoor code would need to be shipped in the public client), but can't easily help with the website version[1] even if a framework exists to analyse the clients and verify that the correct public keys are in use.
It's still worse than Signal. Use Signal.
[1] Since they could still just serve backdoored Javascript to specific users. This is, unfortunately, kind of an inherent problem when it comes to web-based clients - we don't have good frameworks to detect whether the site itself is malicious.
Si tu utilises une seedbox pour tes téléchargements torrents, tu sais à quel point ça peut être pénible de devoir transférer les fichiers manuellement vers ton NAS. C’est exactement pour ça que j’ai créé SeedboxSync : un outil simple et léger qui automatise cette étape. SeedboxSync se connecte à ta seedbox via SFTP, et copie […]
(Edit: Twitter could improve this significantly with very few changes - I wrote about that here. It's unclear why they'd launch without doing that, since it entirely defeats the point of using HSMs)
When Twitter[1] launched encrypted DMs a couple of years ago, it was the worst kind of end-to-end encrypted - technically e2ee, but in a way that made it relatively easy for Twitter to inject new encryption keys and get everyone's messages anyway. It was also lacking a whole bunch of features such as "sending pictures", so the entire thing was largely a waste of time. But a couple of days ago, Elon announced the arrival of "XChat", a new encrypted message platform built on Rust with (Bitcoin style) encryption, whole new architecture. Maybe this time they've got it right?
tl;dr - no. Use Signal. Twitter can probably obtain your private keys, and admit that they can MITM you and have full access to your metadata.
The new approach is pretty similar to the old one in that it's based on pretty straightforward and well tested cryptographic primitives, but merely using good cryptography doesn't mean you end up with a good solution. This time they've pivoted away from using the underlying cryptographic primitives directly and into higher level abstractions, which is probably a good thing. They're using Libsodium's boxes for message encryption, which is, well, fine? It doesn't offer forward secrecy (if someone's private key is leaked then all existing messages can be decrypted) so it's a long way from the state of the art for a messaging client (Signal's had forward secrecy for over a decade!), but it's not inherently broken or anything. It is, however, written in C, not Rust[2].
That's about the extent of the good news. Twitter's old implementation involved clients generating keypairs and pushing the public key to Twitter. Each client (a physical device or a browser instance) had its own private key, and messages were simply encrypted to every public key associated with an account. This meant that new devices couldn't decrypt old messages, and also meant there was a maximum number of supported devices and terrible scaling issues and it was pretty bad. The new approach generates a keypair and then stores the private key using the Juicebox protocol. Other devices can then retrieve the private key.
Doesn't this mean Twitter has the private key? Well, no. There's a PIN involved, and the PIN is used to generate an encryption key. The stored copy of the private key is encrypted with that key, so if you don't know the PIN you can't decrypt the key. So we brute force the PIN, right? Juicebox actually protects against that - before the backend will hand over the encrypted key, you have to prove knowledge of the PIN to it (this is done in a clever way that doesn't directly reveal the PIN to the backend). If you ask for the key too many times while providing the wrong PIN, access is locked down.
But this is true only if the Juicebox backend is trustworthy. If the backend is controlled by someone untrustworthy[3] then they're going to be able to obtain the encrypted key material (even if it's in an HSM, they can simply watch what comes out of the HSM when the user authenticates if there's no validation of the HSM's keys). And now all they need is the PIN. Turning the PIN into an encryption key is done using the Argon2id key derivation function, using 32 iterations and a memory cost of 16MB (the Juicebox white paper says 16KB, but (a) that's laughably small and (b) the code says 16 * 1024 in an argument that takes kilobytes), which makes it computationally and moderately memory expensive to generate the encryption key used to decrypt the private key. How expensive? Well, on my (not very fast) laptop, that takes less than 0.2 seconds. How many attempts to I need to crack the PIN? Twitter's chosen to fix that to 4 digits, so a maximum of 10,000. You aren't going to need many machines running in parallel to bring this down to a very small amount of time, at which point private keys can, to a first approximation, be extracted at will.
Juicebox attempts to defend against this by supporting sharding your key over multiple backends, and only requiring a subset of those to recover the original. I can't find any evidence that Twitter's does seem to be making use of this,Twitter uses three backends and requires data from at least two, but all the backends used are under x.com so are presumably under Twitter's direct control. Trusting the keystore without needing to trust whoever's hosting it requires a trustworthy communications mechanism between the client and the keystore. If the device you're talking to can prove that it's an HSM that implements the attempt limiting protocol and has no other mechanism to export the data, this can be made to work. Signal makes use of something along these lines using Intel SGX for contact list and settings storage and recovery, and Google and Apple also have documentation about how they handle this in ways that make it difficult for them to obtain backed up key material. Twitter has no documentation of this, and as far as I can tell does nothing to prove that the backend is in any way trustworthy. (Edit to add: The Juicebox API does support authenticated communication between the client and the HSM, but that relies on you having some way to prove that the public key you're presented with corresponds to a private key that only exists in the HSM. Twitter gives you the public key whenever you communicate with them, so even if they've implemented this properly you can't prove they haven't made up a new key and MITMed you the next time you retrieve your key)
On the plus side, Juicebox is written in Rust, so Elon's not 100% wrong. Just mostly wrong.
But ok, at least you've got viable end-to-end encryption even if someone can put in some (not all that much, really) effort to obtain your private key and render it all pointless? Actually no, since you're still relying on the Twitter server to give you the public key of the other party and there's no out of band mechanism to do that or verify the authenticity of that public key at present. Twitter can simply give you a public key where they control the private key, decrypt the message, and then reencrypt it with the intended recipient's key and pass it on. The support page makes it clear that this is a known shortcoming and that it'll be fixed at some point, but they said that about the original encrypted DM support and it never was, so that's probably dependent on whether Elon gets distracted by something else again. And the server knows who and when you're messaging even if they haven't bothered to break your private key, so there's a lot of metadata leakage.
Signal doesn't have these shortcomings. Use Signal.
[1] I'll respect their name change once Elon respects his daughter
[2] There are implementations written in Rust, but Twitter's using the C one with these JNI bindings
[3] Or someone nominally trustworthy but who's been compelled to act against your interests - even if Elon were absolutely committed to protecting all his users, his overarching goals for Twitter require him to have legal presence in multiple jurisdictions that are not necessarily above placing employees in physical danger if there's a perception that they could obtain someone's encryption keys
The Kernel docs are a little old. They point to the Device Drivers book, which was great, but quite outdated; it was written around version 2.6 and the Kernel is up to 6.15. Here are my notes that go from those docs to where things are today.
First, the module mapping is no longer in /lib/modules/ KERNEL_VERSION/modules.pcimap. but rather in the more general /lib/modules/ KERNEL_VERSION/modules.alias file. For example, if I run lspic, my last entry is:
If I look in less /lib/modules/6.15.0-0.rc7.58.fc43.x86_64/modules.alias I see many entries that map to that module:
alias pci:v000010ECd00005000svsdbcsci* r8169 alias pci:v000010ECd00003000svsdbcsci* r8169 alias pci:v000010ECd00008126svsdbcsci* r8169 alias pci:v000010ECd00008125svsdbcsci* r8169
But which one is mine? Lets see how much info lspci -vvxxx can give us;
While updating the Edusign validator to a newer
version, I had to build the image with JDK 21 (which is there in Debian Sid).
And while the application starts, it fails to read the TLS keystore file with a
specific error:
... 13 common frames omitted
Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Could not load store from '/tmp/demo.edusign.sunet.se.p12'
at org.springframework.boot.ssl.jks.JksSslStoreBundle.loadKeyStore(JksSslStoreBundle.java:140) ~[spring-boot-3.4.4.jar!/:3.4.4]
at org.springframework.boot.ssl.jks.JksSslStoreBundle.createKeyStore(JksSslStoreBundle.java:107) ~[spring-boot-3.4.4.jar!/:3.4.4]
... 25 common frames omitted
Caused by: java.io.IOException: keystore password was incorrect
at java.base/sun.security.pkcs12.PKCS12KeyStore.engineLoad(PKCS12KeyStore.java:2097) ~[na:na]
at java.base/sun.security.util.KeyStoreDelegator.engineLoad(KeyStoreDelegator.java:228) ~[na:na]
at java.base/java.security.KeyStore.load(KeyStore.java:1500) ~[na:na]
at org.springframework.boot.ssl.jks.JksSslStoreBundle.loadKeyStore(JksSslStoreBundle.java:136) ~[spring-boot-3.4.4.jar!/:3.4.4]
... 26 common frames omitted
Caused by: java.security.UnrecoverableKeyException: failed to decrypt safe contents entry: javax.crypto.BadPaddingException: Given final block not properly padded. Such issues can arise if a bad key is used during decryption.
... 30 common frames omitted
I understood that somehow it is not being able to read file due to bad passphrase. But, the same file with same passphrase can be opened by the older
version of the application (in the older containers).
After spending too many hours reading, I finally found the trouble. The
openssl was using too new algorithm. By default it will use AES_256_CBC for
encryption and PBKDF2 for key derivation. But, if we pass -legacy to the
openssl pkcs12 -export command, then it using RC2_CBC or 3DES_CBC for
certificate encryption depening if RC2 cipher is enabled.
This finally solved the issue and the container started cleanly.
Dans le cadre des 20 ans de Fedora-fr (et du Projet Fedora en lui-même), Charles-Antoine Couret (Renault) et Nicolas Berrehouc (Nicosss) avons souhaité poser des questions à des contributeurs francophones du Projet Fedora et de Fedora-fr.
Grâce à la diversité des profils, cela permet de voir le fonctionnement du Projet Fedora sous différents angles pour voir le projet au delà de la distribution mais aussi comment il est organisé et conçu. Notons que sur certains points, certaines remarques restent d'application pour d'autres distributions.
N'oublions pas que le Projet Fedora reste un projet mondial et un travail d'équipe ce que ces entretiens ne permettent pas forcément de refléter. Mais la communauté francophone a de la chance d'avoir suffisamment de contributeurs de qualité pour permettre d'avoir un aperçu de beaucoup de sous projets de la distribution.
L'entretien du jour concerne Johan Cwiklinski (pseudo trasher), ancien contributeur de Fedora-fr.org et actuel mainteneur du logiciel de gestion Galette.
Entretien
Bonjour Johan, peux-tu présenter brièvement ton parcours ?
Je suis principalement développeur (PHP, Python, Java), et un peu administrateur système - complètement autodidacte. J'ai découvert le monde de GNU/Linux en 1998 en achetant avec deux camarades de fac une distribution Red Hat 5.2 :D
Ce n'est que quelques années plus tard, en 2002, que je reviendrai à Linux ; rapidement comme OS principal. J'ai testé durant cette période différentes distributions comme Red Hat, Fedora, Mandrake et Ubuntu - pour revenir définitivement à Fedora en 2006.
Peux-tu présenter brièvement tes contributions au projet Fedora ?
J'ai traduit de la documentation et des logiciels pour le projet.
J'ai rédigé de la documentation pour le projet officiel (un peu) et pour le communauté francophone (beaucoup plus).
J'ai rédigé des articles pour des magazines divers.
J'ai empaqueté et maintenu différents logiciels dans les dépôts.
J'ai participé à la mise en place et maintenance de certaines versions du site internet de la communauté francophone.
J'ai participé à plusieurs salons informatiques dans le Nord ainsi qu'à Paris et à Bruxelles (FOSDEM), avec d'autres contributeurs francophones de l'époque.
J'ai été responsable de la mise en place de la documentation "Fedora-fr" pendant plusieurs années.
J'ai mis en place avec l'aide d'autres contributeurs différents canaux pour apporter des contributeurs francophones à participer au packaging sur Fedora - via la rédaction d'une documentation assez complète, des présentations lors d'évènements sur Paris, un canal IRC dédié, ...,
Et j'ai aidé à monter l'association "Fedora-fr" - pour laquelle j'ai été trésorier la première année d'existence.
Qu'est-ce qui fait que tu es venu sur Fedora et que tu y es resté (si tu t'en sers encore) ?
Alors, oui, je tourne encore sous Fedora ; que ce soit sur mon ordinateur personnel ou celui du boulot. J'ai même une Fedora sur un serveur dédié que j'administre
Je suis resté sur Fedora parce que la logique du projet orienté vers le logiciel libre me convenait bien, et ensuite parce que j'y participais.
Cette distribution me convient encore tout à fait aujourd'hui, je n'ai pas de raison d'en changer
Pourquoi contribuer à Fedora en particulier ?
À l'époque de la sortie de Fedora, je m'y étais un peu intéressé. J'avais une petite expérience sur d'autres distributions similaires (RedHat) ou pas (Ubuntu) - mais à cette époque, un bref passage du côté de la communauté francophone (notamment sur les canaux IRC) ne m'avait pas réellement séduit.
Ce n'est que deux ans plus tard que j'y suis revenu. J'avais alors décidé de switcher sur Fedora Core 3 définitivement à titre personnel.
L'accueil de la communauté francophone a vraiment été exceptionnel, et je me suis rapidement mis à contribuer.
Contribues-tu à d'autres Logiciels Libres ? Si oui, lesquels et comment ?
Je contribue à un logiciel libre - que je ne citerai pas - pour mon travail, depuis plusieurs années déjà.
Et je suis le leader et principal développeur du projet de gestion d'adhérents "Galette".
Utilises-tu Fedora dans un contexte professionnel ? Et pourquoi ?
Oui, je l'utilise depuis longtemps sur mes postes de travail - ainsi que des distributions approchantes (comme CentOS) sur différents serveurs que j'ai eu à gérer.
La raison est plutôt simple : chaque distribution a ses propres spécificités, et en tant que contributeur au projet, je connais assez bien celles de Fedora. C'est donc tout naturellement que je l'utilise.
J'ai aussi la chance de pouvoir choisir librement mon environnement de travail.
Est-ce que tes contributions à Fedora sont un atout direct ou indirect dans ta vie professionnelle ? Si oui, de quelle façon ?
Un certain atout, oui. Mes contributions ont pu à quelques reprises appuyer mes candidatures à certains postes.
J'ai également pas mal packagé pour le travail, que ce soit pour ajouter des paquets inexistants, ou pour en mettre à jour voire corriger d'autres.
Tu as fait partie des fondateurs du site Fedora-fr.org, peux-tu revenir aux débuts du site à ce moment là ? Comment la communauté francophone a émergé à partir du Projet Fedora né quelques mois plus tôt seulement ?
Alors, je n'ai pas fait partie des fondateurs, je suis arrivé juste après
La communauté francophone existait déjà, il y avait un site, un tout petit peu de documentation, le forum, les canaux IRC, ... Tous les outils étaient déjà en place, de même que les demandes de personnes francophones.
Nous avons alors essayé de faire connaître davantage Fedora et sa communauté - avec un certain succès puisque nous avons toujours été sollicités.
Tu as rédigé ou participé à la rédaction de nombreux articles de la documentation en français à l'époque alors que tout était à faire. Était-ce de simples traductions au départ ? L'accès à des ressources même en anglais était facile à ce moment là ? Ou cela reposait plutôt sur l'expérience ?
J'ai pas mal contribué à la traduction de la documentation officielle dans un premier temps ; leur wiki de l'époque ne rendait pas spécialement la chose facile, et j'ai peu rédigé à cette époque.
Globalement, on pouvait trouver de la documentation plus ou moins facilement (tout est toujours un peu relatif), mais on la trouvait surtout en anglais - et pas forcément sur tous les sujets.
Il faillait aussi connaître un peu, et ne pas se noyer dans la masse des informations "inutiles" pour les nouveaux.
La traduction de la doc officielle était très chronophage, et servait finalement assez peu, des questions revenaient souvent.
C'est là qu'est arrivé le wiki de la doc francophone, agencé différemment, dont l'un des objectifs était de fournir toute une série d'articles pour les débutants, et qui ne posait pas certaines limites de la documentation officielle (l'installation de certains pilotes matériels ou de certaines bibliothèques notamment).
Quelle était la répartition des tâches entre pour la maintenance du site ?
Chacun faisait ce qu'il pouvait ? :D
J'étais principalement en charge de la maintenance du Wiki (backend et frontend), et de Galette. Il pouvait m'arriver de donner un coup du main sur d'autres aspects, mais c'était assez rare somme toute.
Tu as contribué à différents sites pour le Projet Fedora, lesquels ?
Au niveau du Projet lui même, je pense n'avoir contribué qu'à la documentation. Sur fedora-fr.org, la documentation, le site de l'association, et très peu les forums.
Quelles différences vois-tu entre les sites aujourd'hui et ceux de l'époque alors que le projet était naissant ?
Il y en a vraiment beaucoup :D
Du côté du projet anglophone, les pages d'accueil sont plus claires et "vendeuses" aujourd'hui. La documentation a globalement pas mal changé, on s'y retrouve plus facilement, et c'est mieux indexé par les moteurs de recherche.
Du côté francophone, le changement le plus notable est certainement l'abandon des forums historiques pour le passage à une solution plus moderne et lisible
Tu as également crée et tu maintiens toujours le logiciel Galette pour gérer l'association, pourquoi avoir crée ce logiciel ? En dehors de Fedora-fr il y a d'autres utilisateurs ?
Je n'ai pas créé Galette. Le projet a été créé en 2003 sous l'impulsion de l'ALDIL (LUG de Lyon).
Peu de logiciels de gestion d'association de cette époque existent encore aujourd'hui
À la création de l'association Fedora-fr en 2007, nous avons rapidement cherché un moyen de gérer les adhérents. Plusieurs projets auraient pu répondre à la demande, mais Galette était celui qui collait le plus.
J'ai donc entrepris de mettre en œuvre une instance de Galette. Je suis tombé sur deux-trois soucis qui devaient être corrigés, j'ai donc commencé à contribuer au projet.
Rapidement, le projet a eu besoin d'un nouveau mainteneur, et je me suis proposé... C'était le 18 mai 2007
Depuis lors, je me suis consacré à l'amélioration du projet ; de nouvelle versions majeures comportant de nouvelles fonctionnalités voient le jour régulièrement.
À ce que j'en sais, plusieurs centaines d'associations utilisent Galette aujourd'hui - difficile de savoir exactement.
Tu as globalement fait un pas de côté à partir de 2012 de Fedora-fr et même de Fedora en général, peux-tu expliquer pourquoi ?
J'ai effectivement commencé à m'éloigner du projet en 2012, je continuais à participer notamment au niveau packaging, mais j'ai tout arrêté depuis 2021.
Il n'y a pas de raison vraiment particulière, ma situation personnelle a pas mal évolué depuis toutes ces années ; je n'ai plus autant de temps libre, et aussi d'autres centres d'intérêt.
Si tu avais la possibilité de changer quelque chose dans la distribution Fedora ou dans sa manière de fonctionner, qu'est-ce que ce serait ?
Je n'ai trop rien à répondre sur le sujet
À l'inverse, est-ce qu'il y a quelque chose que tu souhaiterais conserver à tout prix dans la distribution ou le projet en lui même ?
Je dirai l'aspect communautaire et libre ; c'est quand même ce qui fait que j'utilise la distribution depuis toutes ces années
Que penses-tu de la communauté Fedora-fr que ce soit son évolution et sa situation actuelle ? Qu'est-ce que tu améliorerais si tu en avais la possibilité ?
Je ne suis plus trop au faîte de tout cela, et depuis trop longtemps je pense... Je ne connais pas la situation de la communauté francophone aujourd'hui.
Quant à changer des choses... Là encore, je ne sais pas trop.
Quelque chose à ajouter ?
Merci aux contributeurs actuels de continuer le travail entrepris et de continuer de faire vire la communauté !
Merci Johan pour ta contribution !
Conclusion
Nous espérons que cet entretien vous a permis d'en découvrir un peu plus sur le site Fedora-fr.
Si vous avez des questions ou que vous souhaitez participer au Projet Fedora ou Fedora-fr, ou simplement l'utiliser et l'installer sur votre machine, n'hésitez pas à en discuter avec nous en commentaire ou sur le forum Fedora-fr.
À dans 10 jours pour un entretien avec Jean-Baptiste Holcroft, un des mainteneurs de la traduction française de Fedora.
Here are the release notes from Cockpit 340, cockpit-podman 107, cockpit-machines 333, and cockpit-ostree 211:
Storage: Prevent modifying unsupported partitions
Cockpit now detects unsupported partitions and displays a notice that Cockpit does not support it, such as modifying LVM2 Logical Volume partitions.
Storage: Rename safety warning
We now display a warning when renaming volume groups that contain the root filesystem as it might break the next boot.
Podman: Quadlet log links
Quadlet logs now link to their systemd service log page counterpart.
Machines: Virtual network interfaces can now select source mode
When adding a new virtual network interface you can now select between VEPA, Bridge, Private, or Passthrough for more flexibility with how machines are exposed to the network.
Try it out
Cockpit 340, cockpit-podman 107, cockpit-files 22, cockpit-machines
334, and cockpit-ostree 211 are available now:
For my new job, I (annoyingly) have to use a silly MacBook. For everything else, I have a nice, beautiful desktop running Fedora.
I looked into KVMs to share my monitor and keyboard between the two computers, but couldn't really find something reasonably priced and functional.
Synergy/Barrier/InputLeap for keyboard sharing
I have used Synergy before to share keyboard and mouse between Linux computers, and this was already a good step. There is a fork for Synergy on Linux called Barrier, which now has been forked again to InputLeap. Now the maintained version is Deskflow. It also allows copy & paste between systems.
This brought me half to where I wanted to be, but I was still restricted to the tiny laptop screen on the Mac.
DDC monitor input source switching
Both of my monitors are connected via DisplayPort to my desktop. I now
connected the right monitor also via HDMI to the Mac. This already
allowed me to easily switch between the input sources with the monitor's
on-screen menu.
While researching a new monitor, which has a build in KVM, but only comes with software for Mac & Windows, I found out that you can control most monitor functionality via DCC.
This includes things like brightness, contrast, rotation, and most importantly the input source.
For Linux, you can use ddcutil and your window manager keyboard shortcut settings. For me, it is these two commands, your monitor and sources may vary.
On OS X you can use BetterDisplay, this is a pretty nifty tool to control all kinds of aspects of your display, definitely worth a look. It also supports keyboard shortcuts to change input sources.
There you go, easy-peasy and for free. I hope that helps someone, or me in the future, when I forget how it works.
While most Java-based drivers have been deprecated in syslog-ng years ago, we have recently removed all of them in preparation to syslog-ng 4.9.0. Right now, the only Java-based driver remaining is HDFS, so we want to ask the syslog-ng community if the HDFS destination is still needed for them.
A bit of background
The Java destination was originally added to syslog-ng to be able to send log messages to Elasticsearch. Later, HTTP, HDFS and Kafka drivers were also added. Unfortunately, these Java-based drivers were difficult (or impossible) to submit to Linux distributions. In addition, they were also difficult to maintain, used more resources, and were problematic to configure. Over the years, most of the Java-based drivers were replaced by native C drivers, so the Java-based drivers became deprecated.
Many of the dependencies used by the Java-based drivers are no longer maintained and contain CVE problems. This is why we decided that deprecation is not enough: we must remove these drivers from the syslog-ng source code.
There is only one exception: HDFS. It is still there, as there is no C-based driver for HDFS yet in syslog-ng, and it is CVE free. Still, we would love to remove all Java-based drivers – however, before we would spend any more resources to develop a C-based alternative for it, we would like to ask you if there is an actual need for it. If nobody actually needs an HDFS driver, then simply deprecating HDFS support and deleting it a few releases later would be the easiest solution for us.
Status
Java-based drivers were never included in mainstream Linux distributions for two reasons. Firstly, because their dependencies were not available in those distributions, and secondly, because the use of binary JAR files was not supported. Despite this, I maintained RPM packages with Java-based drivers for many years, but eventually removed these drivers from my packages half a decade ago. Nobody complained about this – all I know is that people still use the Java destination for their own drivers.
Building Java-based drivers is still an option in FreeBSD ports, but even there, only HDFS will be available starting from syslog-ng 4.9.0.
I updated packaging to follow up with the driver removal, as I had to remove Java-related configuration files from file lists.
Question to the community
So, do you still use the Java-based HDFS driver of syslog-ng? If you still need it, please let us know on the mailing list or open an issue / discussion on the syslog-ng GitHub page: https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng/
-
If you have questions or comments related to syslog-ng, do not hesitate to contact us. You can reach us by email or even chat with us. For a list of possibilities, check our GitHub page under the “Community” section at https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng. On Twitter, I am available as @PCzanik, on Mastodon as @Pczanik@fosstodon.org.
Inteligência Artificial tem melhorado ao ponto que imagens e vídeos gerados por IA são muito convincentes e indistinguíveis da realidade. Entramos na era em que IA pode se tornar uma poderosa fonte de inverdades, fake news etc.
É aí que jornalistas e seus meios devem ganhar protagonismo e a atenção dos leitores e telespectadores. Pois, lembrando, o papel do repórter é ir lá checar se é verdade e contar o que viu. Pode até adicionar opinião depois, mas primeiro publicar fatos apurados.
Mas qual é a diferença entre bom jornalismo e pessoa qualquer que repassa “notícias” no zap ou memes nas redes? A diferença é a mesma entre o médico diplomado, experiente, e o sujeito que vende na Praça da Sé, para curar todos os males, elixir de conhaque mijado. Este último não tem método, ciência nem reputação a zelar. Isso sem nem entrar no mérito da profundidade do conteúdo.
Jornalismo profissional é mais necessário do que nunca na nossa era da pós-verdade, inteligência artificial e fake news.
Looking at what tags to use for this post, it surprised me that it’s been over two years since I posted about taking recharge (basically a short sabbatical).
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…
Some reorganizations happen at work, but I’m still basically working upstream on Linux distributions. I have a US passport now, which means traveling to the Schengen area is now straightforward; on the other hand it does mean more travel and more jet lag… and I got promoted!
Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 02 June 2025 at 1300 UTC.
The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend.
You can join us in the Fedora meeting channel on chat.fedoraproject.org (our Matrix instance).
Note that you can also access this channel from other Matrix home severs, so you do not have to create a Fedora account just to attend the meeting.
You can use this link to convert the meeting time to your local time.
Or, you can also use this command in the terminal:
$date-d'Monday, June 02, 2025 13:00 UTC'
The meeting will be chaired by @ankursinha.
The agenda for the meeting is:
This article includes an in-depth introduction to the Linux terminal, detailed descriptions of each command, installation instructions for various distributions (Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, and Arch), usage examples, and relevant links to official documentation and repositories.
Introduction: The Terminal, the Brain of Linux
In the age of graphical user interfaces and slick desktops, the command-line interface (CLI) remains a core pillar of the Linux experience. It’s not just a legacy tool — it’s a powerhouse of efficiency, automation, and control. From system administrators and developers to power users and hobbyists, the terminal offers unmatched versatility and performance. Understanding how to navigate and leverage the CLI isn’t just beneficial — it’s essential for unlocking the full power of any Linux-based system.
Bash scripting – Help in terminal window
Graphical environments can certainly be convenient, but they often come at the cost of speed, flexibility, and scripting power. The terminal, on the other hand, gives users access to the raw heart of the operating system, enabling advanced file manipulation, system diagnostics, remote management, software compilation, and more. What’s more, it empowers users to chain tools together, automate complex workflows, and extend system functionality in creative ways.
Beyond the ubiquitous utilities like ls, cd, grep, find, and top, the Linux ecosystem is thriving with lesser-known but incredibly useful or amusing commands that make daily workflows more efficient — and sometimes more entertaining.
This article isn’t just a collection of commands; it’s a curated journey through 50 tools that enhance usability, productivity, and system mastery. Whether you’re a seasoned sysadmin or a terminal-curious developer, you’ll discover utilities here that streamline your life, improve your system visibility, or even add a touch of fun to your terminal time.
For each command listed, you’ll find installation instructions tailored to the major Linux distributions: Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, and Arch Linux. If you’ve never tried these tools before, now’s your moment to expand your command-line toolkit.
Let’s dive in.
Section 1: File Navigation & Management
1. zoxide – Smarter Directory Jumper
Description: Replaces cd with an intelligent, history-based directory switcher.
Description: TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read) offers simplified and community-driven versions of common man pages.
Why it’s useful: It provides concise examples for how to use commands, which is especially handy for beginners and pros alike who just need a quick syntax refresher.
Absolutely! Here are commands 16 to 50 following the exact same detailed format with installation instructions, usage, and brief descriptions in English:
16. fd – Simple, Fast and User-Friendly Alternative to find
Description: A modern replacement for find with intuitive syntax and colorized output.
Linux is a treasure trove of powerful commands, many of which are not only functional but also quirky, entertaining, or surprisingly enlightening. Among the more esoteric but fascinating commands available in the Linux ecosystem, several stand out for their creativity, cleverness, or practical value in specific scenarios. Let’s explore a selection of particularly intriguing commands from the list above, providing detailed descriptions, real-life examples, and insights into how they can enrich your Linux experience.
One of the more surprisingly informative commands is whatis. While seemingly simple, whatis provides a concise one-line summary of any Linux command. It’s especially useful for newcomers or when working in a complex system where many utilities are installed. For example, running:
whatis grep
outputs:
grep (1) - print lines matching a pattern
This allows users to quickly check what a command does without diving into its man page. It’s effectively a metadata lookup and is backed by the same databases that power the man command itself, but distilled into a quick overview.
In a similar vein, apropos serves as a powerful discovery tool. Instead of looking up a specific command, apropos allows users to find commands related to a specific topic. It searches the whatis database for any entry that contains the given keyword. For instance:
apropos compression
might return a list including gzip, bzip2, xz, and zip, each with a brief description. It’s like grep for the command library, making it invaluable for discovering tools you didn’t even know existed.
Among the more entertaining utilities is cowsay, a classic example of Unix whimsy. When invoked, cowsay takes input text and has an ASCII-art cow “say” it in a speech bubble:
cowsay "I love Linux!"
results in:
_____________
< I love Linux! >
-------------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||
This command is frequently used in system login messages, scripts for humorous purposes, or as part of more elaborate pipelines, especially when combined with fortune.
The fortune command itself is another piece of classic Unix fun. It displays a random, often witty or philosophical quote. When piped into cowsay, it creates an amusing banner:
fortune | cowsay
This combination became a meme in the Unix world and often appears as the default login message in retro-themed Linux distros. For those wanting even more visual novelty, cowsay can be replaced with cowthink or configured with other animals via the -f option, including Tux the penguin, ghosts, and even moose.
The sl command is a brilliant lesson in embracing user error with humor. It stands for “Steam Locomotive” and is triggered when a user mistypes “ls” as “sl.” Instead of a cryptic error, users are greeted with a cheerful ASCII art steam train chugging across the terminal. To see it in action:
sl
Though its utility is nil, its charm is infinite—especially in systems that have it installed as a lighthearted easter egg.
On the more technical side of things, script is a deeply useful tool for recording terminal sessions. It captures everything displayed on your terminal and saves it to a file—useful for debugging, documentation, or training materials. For example:
script session.log
initiates a recording session. Everything typed and output to the terminal will now be saved to session.log. Typing exit ends the recording. This is essential for creating reproducible demonstrations or auditing sessions.
Another fascinating command is yes. While seemingly trivial, yes is a high-performance text outputter that continuously prints a string until interrupted. It’s often used to simulate user input in shell scripts that expect confirmation prompts:
yes | apt-get install something
This automatically confirms all “Are you sure?” prompts. Additionally, yes can be a fun benchmark tool, as it outputs data rapidly to stdout and can be redirected to measure disk or CPU speed. You can also customize the output:
yes "Testing 123"
This will endlessly print “Testing 123” to the terminal until Ctrl+C is pressed.
Moving into slightly more unconventional territory, toilet and figlet are two utilities that transform text into large ASCII art. For example:
These can be used for scripts, banners, or notifications. They’re not just artistic—they’re also practical when used to create legible section headers in log files or notifications.
In terms of introspection and system personality, uname and uptime are valuable. uname reveals system-level information:
uname -a
might return:
Linux mymachine 5.15.0-60-generic #66-Ubuntu SMP x86_64 GNU/Linux
This is useful when logging system metadata or debugging issues related to kernel version, architecture, or OS. Meanwhile, uptime tells you how long the system has been running, along with current user count and system load averages:
This compact output is often monitored in scripts or dashboards to track stability or detect overloads.
For visualization of command pipelines and processes, the command pv (Pipe Viewer) is an often overlooked gem. It allows you to monitor the progress of data through a pipeline. For example:
pv largefile.tar.gz | tar xzf -
lets you see a progress bar and data rate for the file being extracted. It’s indispensable for operations involving large files, where you otherwise get no feedback until completion.
Another visually satisfying utility is lolcat, which adds a rainbow coloring effect to output. Used in conjunction with figlet:
figlet Welcome | lolcat
creates a vivid, colorful greeting—fun for custom login scripts or system branding.
A more practical but underutilized command is watch. It re-executes a command at regular intervals and displays the output full screen, refreshing like a terminal dashboard:
watch -n 1 df -h
This refreshes disk usage stats every second, useful for real-time monitoring during operations like backups or installs.
Lastly, one cannot omit the powerful and poetic cal. This simple utility prints a calendar for the current month, or any month/year:
cal 9 2025
outputs the calendar for September 2025. It’s useful for scripting date-based logs, scheduling scripts, or just glancing at your terminal-based planner. When combined with ncal, you can even show week numbers or the calendar in vertical format.
In conclusion, Linux is not just a technical environment—it’s a rich culture filled with humorous, helpful, and historic commands that reflect the ethos of Unix philosophy: small, sharp tools that do one thing well. Whether you’re piping cowsay into lolcat or using script to capture a debugging session, these commands make Linux not only a powerful operating system but a delightful one too.
Final Thoughts
The Linux terminal is more than just a tool — it’s a canvas. Each of the commands listed here, from the practical to the quirky, represents the incredible flexibility of open-source culture. These tools demonstrate how Linux not only solves problems efficiently but also makes the experience personal and even delightful.
Whether you’re optimizing workflows, analyzing system performance, or just trying to make your terminal look cooler, the command line offers endless possibilities.
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Cheers – I’m enjoying my journey. 
) mais ça a été une grosse douche froide à l'époque, donc stand-by avant de goûter à Mandrake qui proposait une utilisation plus abordable. Puis j'ai découvert Fedora Core à sa sortie que j'ai commencé à utiliser en parallèle d'un Windows car c'était encore difficile de se défaire de ses habitudes avec certains logiciels. Mais la bascule s'est faite finalement très rapidement par la suite malgré tout et depuis pas mal d'années maintenant je n'utilise plus que Fedora Linux, tant en poste de travail que serveur d'ailleurs.
Tip: To enable virtualization, access your BIOS/UEFI (usually F2 or DEL during boot) and activate Intel VT-x or AMD-V.
Disclaimer: Installing macOS on non-Apple hardware violates Apple’s EULA and is not supported by VMware.
Keep Host OS Updated
comments? additions? reactions?
As always, comment on mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@nirik/114802872655170817