Habeas data, my data my right, is the ethos of the right to be a free and fulfilling individual. It offers the individual to be him/herself without being monitored.

In The United States, there are several salvos to protect and further the concept.

The First Amendment

The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution establishes the

• Freedom of speech,
• Freedom of the press,
• Freedom exercise of religion,
• Freedom to assemble peaceably

The Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment(Amendment IV) to the United States Constitution

• prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures;
• establishes The right to privacy is protected by the US Constitution, though the exact word privacy has not been used. But if we have a close look to the Amendment to the Bill of Rights, it bars Government to issue a general warrant.

The Privacy Protection Act, 1980

The Act protects press, journalists, media house, newsroom from the search conducted by the government office bearers. It mandates that it shall be unlawful for a government employee to search for or seize “work product” or “documentary materials” that are possessed by a person “in connection with a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication”, in connection with the investigation or prosecution of a criminal offense, [42 U.S.C. §§ 2000aa (a), (b) (1996)]. An order, a subpoena is necessary for accessing the information, documents.

But the Government for the time again have violated, disregarded these mandates and stepped outside their periphery in the name of security of the state.

The present situation with DreamHost

DreamHost is A Los Angeles based company(private). It provides the following services, Web hosting service, Cloud computing service, Cloud storage service, Domain name registrar. The company since past few months is fighting a legal battle to protect their and one of their customer’s, disruptj20.org fundamental right.

What is disruptj20.org?

The company hosts disruptj20.org in the web. It is a website which organized, encouraged willing individuals to participate against the present US Government. Wikipedia says - “DisruptJ20 (also Disrupt J20), a Washington, D.C.-based political organization founded in July 2016 and publicly launched on November 11 of the same year, stated its initial aim as protesting and disrupting events of the presidential inauguration of the 45th U.S.”

The Search Warrant

There was a Search Warrant issued against DreamHost. It requires them to
disclose, give away “the information associated with www.disruptj20.org that is stored at the premises owned, maintained, controlled, or operated by DreamHost,” [ATTACHMENT A].

The particular list of information to be disclosed and information to be seized by the government can be seen at ATTACHMENT B.

How it affects third parties (other than www.disruptj20.org)?

It demands to reveal to the government of “all files” related to the website, which includes the HTTP logs for the visitors, - means

• the time and date of the visit,
• the IP address for the visitor,
• the website pages viewed by the visitor (through their IP address),
• the detailed description of the software running in the visitor’s computer.
• details of emails by the third party to the www.disruptj20.org.

Responding to it the company challenged the Department of Justice (on the warrant). They made an attempt to quash the demand of seizure and disclosure of the information by due legal process and reason.

Motion to show cause

In a usual course of action, the DOJ would respond to the inquiries of DreamHost. But here instead of answering to their inquiries, DOJ chose to file a motion to show cause in the Washington, D.C. Superior Court. DOJ asked for an order to compel them to produce the records,

The Opposition

The Opposition for the denial of the above mentioned motion filed by DreamHost filed an Opposition for the denial of the above mentioned motion. The “Argument” part shows/claims/demonstrates

• How the Search Warrant Violates the Fourth Amendment and the Privacy Protection Act.
• The Search Warrant requires the details of the visitors to the website.This severely endangers their freedom of speech (The First Amendment). As described by DreamHost on their blog.

“This motion is our latest salvo in what has become a months-long battle to protect the identities of thousands of unwitting internet users.”

Electronic Frontier Foundation has led their support, help to DreamHost, though they are not representing them in the court. The matter will be heard on August 18 in Washington, D.C.

There are different kinds of securities. Security for state power is a kind that is constantly protected. In contrast to the security for the population which is constantly denied, negated, curbed and restrained. By looking at the series of events, the documentary records of this particular incident raises a doubt -

• If the Government action is motivated by security or not?

The only security in this case is probably is being considered is security to stay in power, noticing the nature, subject of the website. Now it is the high time that people should stand to save individual’s, commoner’s right to have private space, opinion and protest. Kudous to DreamHost to protect the primary fundamental right of and individual - Privacy.

I have installed and configured StumpWM (v1.0.0) on Parabola GNU/Linux-libre. StumpWM is a keyboard driven, tiling Window Manager written in Common Lisp (CL). It is thus very hackable, and you can customize its configuration by writing Lisp code and reload it dynamically. The installation and configuration steps are provided below for reference.

Firstly, the Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) compiler needs to be installed on the system using Pacman.

$ sudo pacman -S sbcl 
$ sudo pacman -S acpi xtrlock emacs mate-terminal iceweasel

The acpi utility is installed to show the battery status in the modeline. The xtrlock utility is used to lock the screen. When the screen is locked, you will need to enter your user password to unlock the same. GNU Emacs, Iceweasel and Mate-terminal software packages are also installed. Quicklisp is a package manager for Common Lisp and is used to install the StumpWM dependencies with SBCL.

An installation directory is created at ~/downloads/quicklisp, and the quicklisplisp file is fetched as follows:

$ mkdir ~/downloads/quicklisp
$ cd ~/downloads/quicklisp
$ curl -O https://beta.quicklisp.org/quicklisp.lisp

The quicklisp.lisp file is loaded using the SBCL interpreter. The installation steps and output are shown below:

~/downloads/quicklisp $ sbcl --load quicklisp.lisp 

    This is SBCL 1.3.17, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp.
    More information about SBCL is available at <http://www.sbcl.org/>.

    SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty.
    It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under
    BSD-style licenses.  See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the
    distribution for more information.

      ==== quicklisp quickstart 2015-01-28 loaded ====

        To continue with installation, evaluate: (quicklisp-quickstart:install)

        For installation options, evaluate: (quicklisp-quickstart:help)

* (quicklisp-quickstart:install)

    ; Fetching #<URL "http://beta.quicklisp.org/client/quicklisp.sexp">
    ; 0.82KB
    ==================================================
    838 bytes in 0.00 seconds (0.00KB/sec)
    ; Fetching #<URL "http://beta.quicklisp.org/client/2017-03-06/quicklisp.tar">
    ; 250.00KB
    ==================================================
    256,000 bytes in 0.16 seconds (1602.56KB/sec)
    ; Fetching #<URL "http://beta.quicklisp.org/client/2015-09-24/setup.lisp">
    ; 4.94KB
    ==================================================
    5,054 bytes in 0.00 seconds (0.00KB/sec)
    ; Fetching #<URL "http://beta.quicklisp.org/asdf/2.26/asdf.lisp">
    ; 194.07KB
    ==================================================
    198,729 bytes in 0.09 seconds (2086.79KB/sec)
    ; Fetching #<URL "http://beta.quicklisp.org/dist/quicklisp.txt">
    ; 0.40KB
    ==================================================
    408 bytes in 0.00 seconds (0.00KB/sec)
    Installing dist "quicklisp" version "2017-07-25".
    ; Fetching #<URL "http://beta.quicklisp.org/dist/quicklisp/2017-07-25/releases.txt">
    ; 372.80KB
    ==================================================
    381,744 bytes in 0.15 seconds (2485.31KB/sec)
    ; Fetching #<URL "http://beta.quicklisp.org/dist/quicklisp/2017-07-25/systems.txt">
    ; 241.23KB
    ==================================================
    247,022 bytes in 0.10 seconds (2297.45KB/sec)

      ==== quicklisp installed ====

        To load a system, use: (ql:quickload "system-name")

        To find systems, use: (ql:system-apropos "term")

        To load Quicklisp every time you start Lisp, use: (ql:add-to-init-file)

        For more information, see http://www.quicklisp.org/beta/

    NIL

* (ql:add-to-init-file)

    I will append the following lines to #P"/home/guest/.sbclrc":

      ;;; The following lines added by ql:add-to-init-file:
      #-quicklisp
      (let ((quicklisp-init (merge-pathnames "quicklisp/setup.lisp"
                                             (user-homedir-pathname))))
        (when (probe-file quicklisp-init)
          (load quicklisp-init)))

    Press Enter to continue.

    #P"/home/guest/.sbclrc"

* (ql:quickload "clx")

    To load "clx":
      Install 1 Quicklisp release:
        clx
    ; Fetching #<URL "http://beta.quicklisp.org/archive/clx/2017-06-30/clx-20170630-git.tgz">
    ; 452.92KB
    ==================================================
    463,786 bytes in 0.12 seconds (3806.02KB/sec)
    ; Loading "clx"
    [package xlib]....................................
    ..................................................
    ..................................................
    ..................................................
    ..................................................
    ..................................................
    ..................................................
    ..................................................
    [package xlib/glx]................................
    [package xlib/gl].................................
    [package xlib/dpms]...............................
    [package xlib/xtest]..............................
    [package xlib/xinerama]...........................
    [package xlib-demo/clclock].......................
    [package xlib-demo/clipboard].....................
    [package xlib-demo/demos].........................
    [package xlib-demo/gl-test].......................
    [package xlib-demo/mandel].............
    ("clx")

* (ql:quickload "cl-ppcre")

    To load "cl-ppcre":
      Install 1 Quicklisp release:
        cl-ppcre
    ; Fetching #<URL "http://beta.quicklisp.org/archive/cl-ppcre/2015-09-23/cl-ppcre-2.0.11.tgz">
    ; 156.08KB
    ==================================================
    159,829 bytes in 0.08 seconds (1903.45KB/sec)
    ; Loading "cl-ppcre"
    [package cl-ppcre]................................
    ................
    ("cl-ppcre")

* (ql:quickload "alexandria")

    To load "alexandria":
      Install 1 Quicklisp release:
        alexandria
    ; Fetching #<URL "http://beta.quicklisp.org/archive/alexandria/2017-06-30/alexandria-20170630-git.tgz">
    ; 49.97KB
    ==================================================
    51,168 bytes in 0.04 seconds (1135.65KB/sec)
    ; Loading "alexandria"
    [package alexandria.0.dev].......................
    ("alexandria")

* (exit)

~/downloads/quicklisp $ 

The StumpWM v1.0.0 sources are fetched to ~/downloads/stumpwm directory, extracted and compiled using the following steps:

$ mkdir ~/downloads/stumpwm
$ cd ~/downloads/stumpwm
$ wget https://github.com/stumpwm/stumpwm/archive/1.0.0.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf 1.0.0.tar.gz
$ cd stumpwm-1.0.0/
$ ./autogen.sh 
$ ./configure 
$ make

You can then install the built stumpwm binary, which will get copied to /usr/local/bin/stumpwm as shown below:

$ sudo make install

$ which stumpwm
/usr/local/bin/stumpwm

I use the Lightweight X11 Display Manager (lxdm), and thus created a /usr/share/xsessions/stumpwm.desktop file to login to StumpWM from the login manager:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=StumpWM
Comment=StumpWM
Exec=/usr/local/bin/stumpwm
Type=Application

A sample ~/.stumpwmrc configuration file is given below (should be self-explanatory):

;; -*-lisp-*-

(in-package :stumpwm)

;; Startup message: display the machine's name
(setf *startup-message* (machine-instance))

;; Turn on the modeline
(if (not (head-mode-line (current-head)))
    (toggle-mode-line (current-screen) (current-head)))

;; Lock screen
(define-key *root-map* (kbd "L") "exec xtrlock")

;; I like messages to be centered on the screen.
(setf *message-window-gravity* :center)
(setf *input-window-gravity* :center)

;; I thought that this mode-line was fabulous!
(defvar *battery-status-command*
  "acpi -b | awk -F '[ ,]' '{printf \"%s%s\", $3, $5}' | sed s/Discharging/\-/ | sed s/Unknown// | sed s/Full// | sed s/Charging/+/")

(defvar *vol-status-command*
  "amixer get Master | grep \"[[:digit:]]\\+%\" -o | tr -d \"\\n\"")

(setf *screen-mode-line-format*
      (list "%w [^B%n^b] ^>"
      '(:eval (run-shell-command *battery-status-command* t))
      " | Vol. "
      '(:eval (run-shell-command *vol-status-command* t))
      " | %d"))

;; urxvt
(define-key *root-map* (kbd "c") 
  "exec urxvt +sb -fn \"xft:Ubuntu Mono:pixelsize=15,style=regular\"")

;; Window information format
(setf *window-info-format* "%wx%h %n (%t - %c)")

;; Window format
(setf *window-format* "%m%n%s%10t")

;; Emacs
(defvar *emacs-command* nil
  "Start an emacs client frame. Starts an emacs daemon if necessary.")
(setf *emacs-command* "bash -c -i 'emacsclient -c -a \"\"'")

(define-key *root-map* (kbd "e") "run-emacs")

(defcommand run-emacs () ()
    (run-shell-command (concat "exec " *emacs-command*)))

;; iceweasel
(defcommand iceweasel-browser () ()
  "run iceweasel"
  (run-or-raise "iceweasel" '(:instance "iceweasel")))
(define-key *root-map* (kbd "b") "iceweasel-browser")

;; mate-terminal
(defcommand mate-terminal () ()
  (run-or-raise "mate-terminal --hide-menubar" '(:class "mate-terminal")))

(define-key *root-map* (kbd "C") "mate-terminal")

;; Clear rules
(clear-window-placement-rules)

(define-frame-preference "Default"
  ;; frame raise lock (lock AND raise == jumpto)
  (0 t   t :instance "emacs")
  (1 t   t :instance "iceweasel-browser"))

;; dvorak and தமிழ்
(stumpwm:run-shell-command "sh -c 'setxkbmap us,in dvorak,tam_unicode grp:ctrls_toggle'")

;; Start default applications
(run-emacs)
(iceweasel-browser)

On logging into StumpWM, GNU Emacs and Iceweasel browser are opened automatically. I also switch between English and Tamil keyboard layouts when required, and the two Control keys are used to toggle between them. A StumpWM screenshot is shown below:

You are encouraged to read the StumpWM manual to know more about its usage and configuration.

My morning starts with the quick look at twitter.

Yesterday some tweets drew my attention - The Internet Archive over at http://web.archive.org has been blocked in India. There was a long thread going on, and people were asking, updating thoughts and opinions on the matter.
Ok, this is something important.

What is archive.org?

I searched. I did not have any idea about this previously.
I found that one of the most important projects on the site is “The WayBack machine”; for the site serves/saves/documents the history of the world wide web. Therefore it gives you a salient history of different sites on a single search.

But for last few days many people, in India, could not access archive.org and The Wayback Machine.
Instead, this is what people saw

Specifically, the http://web.archive.org has been blocked but when you add the secure “s”; https://web.archive.org can be accessed.

It was important to have information about which ISPs were actually blocking the site. Tweets poured in from people, across the country. You can find an elaborate list of these ISPs in this blog post by Medianama.

Officials from archive.org were trying to contact the authorities, in India, at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) and the The Telecom Department (DoT). Unfortunately they never responded.

Recent update:

According to a tweet, the site was banned according to a judgment made by The Madras High Court, in Prakash Jha Productions v/s Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited and Others (being, O.A.Nos. 705 to 707 of 2017 in C.S. No. 576 of 2017). It could not be confirmed due to the unavailability of the original judgment document.
According to the tweet by Anivar Arvind, it was a John Doe order. John Doe order means an order passed by the competent Court of Justice against unidentified defendants.

The confusion:

The silence and lack of/no communication on the part of the Government authorities created a lot of confusion.

There were questions such as -
1. Why is the site blocked?
2. Who blocked the site?
3. Is there is any provision to remove the block? And measures (if any) to be taken.

Unfortunately the request is not been heard by the concerned authorities till now.

The sole requirement in this context is, transparency and clarity.
We, the common people have the right to know what is happening in our digital space.
Denying that is a repudiation of a basic and primary right of ours.

The situation has posed a serious question in front of us,
Is this a step taken by the authorities to curb, and restrain our digital (fundamental) rights? (though the Government is trying its level best to prove that we do not have one.)

TL;DR

PyDelhi conf 2017 was a two-day conference which featured workshops, dev sprints, both full-length and lightning talks. There were workshop sessions without any extra charges. Delhiites should not miss the chance to attend this conference in future. I conducted a workshop titled “Tango with Django” helping beginners to understand the Django web framework.

Detailed Review

About the PyDelhi community

PyDelhi conf 2017 volunteers

The PyDelhi community was known as NCR Python Users Group before few years. This community is performing a role of an umbrella organization for other FLOSS communities across New Delhi, India. They are actively arranging monthly meetups on interesting topics. Last PyCon India which is a national level conference of Python programming language was impressively organized by this community. This year too they took the responsibility of managing it. I am very thankful to this community for their immense contribution to this society. If you are around New Delhi, India then you should not miss the chance to attend their meetups. This community has great people who are always happy to mentor.

PyDelhi conf 2017

Conference T-shirt

PyDelhi conf is a regional level conference of Python programming language organized by PyDelhi community. It is their second year organizing this conference. Last year it was located at JNU University. This year it happened at IIM, Lucknow campus based in Noida, New Delhi, India. I enjoyed various talks which I will mention later here, a workshops section because I was conducting one and some panel discussions because people involved were having a good level of experience. 80% of the time slot was divided equally between 30 minutes talk and 2-hour workshop section. 10% were given to panel discussions and 10% was reserved for lightning talks. The dev sprints were happening in parallel with the conference. The early slot was given to workshops for both the days. One large conference hall was located on a 2nd floor of the building and two halls at the ground floor. Food and beverages were served on the base floor.

Panel Discussion

Registration desk

Tea break

Keynote speakers

• Mr. Ricardo Rocha: Mr. Rocha is a software engineer at CERN. I got some time to talk with him post-conference. We discussed his responsibilities at CERN. I was impressed when he explained how he is managing infrastructure with his team. On inquiring opportunities available at CERN he mentioned that the organization is always looking for the talented developers. New grads can keep an eye on various Summer Internship Programs which are very similar to Google Summer of Code program.

• Mr. Chris Stucchio: Mr. Stucchio is director of Data Science at Wingify/ VWO. I found him physically fit compared to other software developers (mostly of India). I didn’t get much time to have a word with him.

Interesting Talks

Because I took the wrong metro train, I was late for the inaugural ceremony. I also missed a keynote given by Mr. Rocha. Below talks were impressively presented at the conference.

• Let’s talk about GIL by Mr. Amit Kumar: Mr. Kumar discussed various ways to trace threads first and then moved the track towards Global Interpreter Lock. He described why the GIL is important in CPython.

• Concurrency in Python 3.0 world - Oh my! by Mr. Anand Pillai: Mr. Pillai is well experienced in programming using Python language. I like getting his advices on various programming topics. He explained how async IO can be leveraged to boost your programs. I got few correct references on understanding latest API of the async library.

• Property based testing 101 by Aniket Maithani: I always enjoy chit chatting with Mr. Maithani during conferences. He has jolly nature and always prepared with one liner. He discussed various strategies for generating demo data for test cases. I was amazed by his references, tips and tricks for generating test data.

I love discussing with people rather than sit in on sessions. With that ace-reason, I always lose some important talks presented at the conference. I do not forget to watch them once they are publicly available. This year I missed following talks.

• Optimizing Django for building high-performance systems by Mr. Sanyam Khurana

• Mocking in Python by Mr. Saurabh Kumar

Volunteer Party

I got a warm invitation by the organizers to join the volunteer party, but I was little tensed about my session happening on the next day. So, I decided to go home and improve the slides. I heard from friends that the party was awesome!

My workshop session

Me conducting workshop

I conducted a workshop on Django web framework. “Tango with Django” was chosen as a title with a thought of attracting beginners. I believe this title is already a name of famous book solving the same purpose.

• Slides

• Video Youtube

Dev sprints

Me hacking at dev sprints section

The dev sprints were happening parallel with the conference. Mr. Pillai was representing Junction. I decided to test few issues of CPython but didn’t do much. There were a bunch of people hacking but didn’t find anything interesting. The quality of chairs was so an impressive that I have decided to buy the same for my home office.

Why attend this conference?

• Free Workshops: The conference has great slot of talks and workshops. Workshops are being conducted by field experts without expecting any other fees. This can be one of the great advantages you leverage from this conference.

• Student discounts: If you are a student then you will receive a discount on the conference ticket.

• Beginner friendly platform: If you are novice speaker than you will get mentorship from this community. You can conduct a session for beginners.

• Networking: You will find senior employees of tech giants, owner of innovative start-ups and professors from well-known universities participating in this conference. It can be a good opportunity for you to network with them.

What was missing?

• Lecture hall arrangement: It was difficult to frequently travel to the second floor and come back to the ground floor. I found most people were spending their time on the ground floor rather than attending talks going on upstairs.

• No corporate stalls: Despite having corporate sponsors like Microsoft I didn’t find any stall of any company.

• The venue for dev sprints: The rooms were designed for teleconference containing circularly arranged wooden tables. This was not creating a collaborative environment. Involved projects were not frequently promoted during the conference.

Thank you PyDelhi community!

I would like to thank all the known, unknown volunteers who performed their best in arranging this conference. I am encouraging PyDelhi community for keep organizing such an affable conference.

• Conference Photos

• Talk videos

Proofreaders: Mr. Daniel Foerster, Mr. Dhavan Vaidya, Mr. Sayan Chowdhury, Mr. Trent Buck

Encrypting hard drives should be a common step in our regular computer usage. If nothing else, this will help you sleep well, in case you lose your computer (theft) or that small USB disk you were carrying in your pocket. In this guide, I’ll explain how to encrypt your USB disks so that you have peace of mind, in case you lose them.

But, before we dig into the technical details, always remember the following from XKCD.

What is LUKS?

LUKS or Linux Unified Key Setup is a disk encryption specification, first introduced in 2004 by Clemens Fruhwirth. Notice the word specification; instead of trying to implement something of its own, LUKS is a standard way of doing drive encryption across tools and distributions. You can even use drives from Windows using the LibreCrypt application.

For the following example, I am going to use a standard 16 GB USB stick as my external drive.

Formatting the drive

Note: check the drive name/path twice before you press enter for any of the commands below. A mistake, might destroy your primary drive, and there is no way to recover the data. So, execute with caution.

In my case, the drive is detected as /dev/sdb. It is always a good idea to format the drive before you start using it. You can use wipefs tool to clean any signature from the device,

$ sudo wipefs -a /dev/sdb1

Then you can use fdisk tool to delete the old partitions , and create a new primary partition.

Next step is to create the LUKS partition.

$ sudo cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sdb1

WARNING!
========
This will overwrite data on /dev/sdb1 irrevocably.

Are you sure? (Type uppercase yes): YES
Enter passphrase: 
Verify passphrase:

Opening up the encrypted drive and creating a filesystem

Next, we will open up the drive using the passphrase we just gave, and create a filesystem on the device.

$ sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 reddrive
Enter passphrase for /dev/sdb1
$ ls -l /dev/mapper/reddrive
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 7 Jul 17 10:18 /dev/mapper/reddrive -> ../dm-5

I am going to create an EXT4 filesystem on here.
Feel free to create which ever filesystem you want.

$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/reddrive -L reddrive
mke2fs 1.43.4 (31-Jan-2017)
Creating filesystem with 3815424 4k blocks and 954720 inodes
Filesystem UUID: b00be39d-4656-4022-92ea-6a518b08f1e1
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
        32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208

Allocating group tables: done                            
Writing inode tables: done                            
Creating journal (16384 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done   

Mounting, using, and unmounting the drive

The device is now ready to use. You can manually mount it with the mount command. Any of the modern desktops will ask you to unlock using the passphrase if you connect the device (or try to double click on the file browser).

I will show the command line option. I will create a file hello.txt as an example.

$ sudo mount /dev/mapper/reddrive /mnt/red
$ su -c "echo hello > /mnt/red/hello.txt"
Password:
$ ls -l /mnt/red
total 20
-rw-rw-r--. 1 root root     6 Jul 17 10:26 hello.txt
drwx------. 2 root root 16384 Jul 17 10:21 lost+found
$ sudo umount /mnt/red
$ sudo cryptsetup luksClose reddrive

When I attach the drive to my system, the file browser asks me to unlock it using the following dialog. Remember to choose forget immediately so that the file browser forgets the password.

On passphrases

The FAQ entry on cryptsetup page, give us hints and suggestions about passphrase creation.

If paranoid, add at least 20 bit. That is roughly four additional characters for random passphrases and roughly 32 characters for a random English sentence.

Key slots aka different passphrases

In LUKS, we get 8 different key slots (for passphrases) for each device(partition). You can see them using luksDump sub-command.

$ sudo cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sdb1 | grep Slot
Key Slot 0: ENABLED
Key Slot 1: DISABLED
Key Slot 2: DISABLED
Key Slot 3: DISABLED
Key Slot 4: DISABLED
Key Slot 5: DISABLED
Key Slot 6: DISABLED
Key Slot 7: DISABLED

Adding a new key

The following command adds a new key to the drive.

$ sudo cryptsetup luksAddKey /dev/sdb1 -S 5
Enter any existing passphrase: 
Enter new passphrase for key slot: 
Verify passphrase:

You will have to use any of the existing passphrases to add a new key.

$  sudo cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sdb1 | grep Slot
Key Slot 0: ENABLED
Key Slot 1: DISABLED
Key Slot 2: DISABLED
Key Slot 3: DISABLED
Key Slot 4: DISABLED
Key Slot 5: ENABLED
Key Slot 6: DISABLED
Key Slot 7: DISABLED

Removing a passphrase

Remember that removing a passphrase is based on the passphrase itself, not by the key slot number.

$ sudo cryptsetup luksRemoveKey /dev/sdb1
Enter passphrase to be deleted: 
$ sudo cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sdb1 | grep Slot
Key Slot 0: ENABLED
Key Slot 1: DISABLED
Key Slot 2: DISABLED
Key Slot 3: DISABLED
Key Slot 4: DISABLED
Key Slot 5: DISABLED
Key Slot 6: DISABLED
Key Slot 7: DISABLED

Now in case you don’t know the passphrase, then you can use luksKillSlot.

$ sudo cryptsetup luksKillSlot /dev/sdb1 3
Enter any remaining passphrase:

Overview of the disk layout

The disk layout looks like the following. The header or phdr contains various details like magic value, version, cipher name, following the 8 keyblocks (marked as kb1, kb2.. in the drawing), and then the encrypted bulk data block. We can see all of those details in the C structure.

struct luks_phdr {
        char            magic[LUKS_MAGIC_L];
        uint16_t        version;
        char            cipherName[LUKS_CIPHERNAME_L];
        char            cipherMode[LUKS_CIPHERMODE_L];
        char            hashSpec[LUKS_HASHSPEC_L];
        uint32_t        payloadOffset;
        uint32_t        keyBytes;
        char            mkDigest[LUKS_DIGESTSIZE];
        char            mkDigestSalt[LUKS_SALTSIZE];
        uint32_t        mkDigestIterations;
        char            uuid[UUID_STRING_L];

        struct {
                uint32_t active;

                /* parameters used for password processing */
                uint32_t passwordIterations;
                char     passwordSalt[LUKS_SALTSIZE];

                /* parameters used for AF store/load */
                uint32_t keyMaterialOffset;
                uint32_t stripes;
        } keyblock[LUKS_NUMKEYS];

        /* Align it to 512 sector size */
        char                _padding[432];
};

Each (active) keyblock contains an encrypted copy of the master key. When we enter the passphrase, it unlocks the master key, that in turn unlocks the encrypted data.

But, remember, all of this is of no use if you have a very simple passphrase. We have another XKCD to explain this.

I hope this post encourages you to use encrypted drives more. All of my computers have their drives encrypted; (I do that while installing the Operating System.) This means, without decrypting the drive you can not boot the system properly. On a related note, remember to turn off your computer completely, (not hibernation or suspend mode) when you’re traveling.

As I have mentioned in the dgplug summer training page, focusing on the Free Software movement is a big part of this year’s training program. A few weeks back there was a tweet from @gnome about travel ban, and many could not figure out why Gnome was writing about this topic. Amongst the many proper replies, Miguel de Icaza’s reply was to the point. This incident made Anwesha and me stop and think; and then made us rethink, about how we wanted to conduct the sessions on the Free Software movement and Software Licensing.

I was born in the beginning of the 80s and Anwesha even later. Our introduction to the movement was from the stories we heard (from many people); from Levy’s famous book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and the seminal Free as in Freedom.

My introduction to the FSF came through ilug-calcutta, and from Sayamindu. Later, at foss.in 2005, I made another friend (for life), Praveen A (he is from the same batch). And even later through out various conferences, I was introduced to other members of FSF India. In 2007, I was part of the 4th GPLv3 meet organizing team in Bangalore. That was my introduction to RMS, and his personality (I will write a blog post later about various incidents from that conference). That had a big impact on me.

Coming back to the story of the tweet, we also saw similar ignorance from newcomers, as they never got a chance to learn about the past, nor did get to meet the various people involved (distance and time). So, Anwesha and I, tried to write a brief history, including the hacker ethic, and beginning of the Free Software movement. A lot of stories mentioned in the article are from the books mentioned above. At the very end, I have written about how the different software we use everyday came about initially. I took the help of various FSF bulletins for the same.

This Monday I took a session on the same topic in the #dgplug IRC channel. When I made mention of the GNU C Library and the time Ronald McGrath started it, Siddhesh called attention to an announcement he (Ronald) made a few days ago (about stepping down from maintainership of that same GNU Library). I also pointed that Siddhesh is now one of the maintainer of Glibc. That gave the students a sense of impact and immediacy; a feeling of involvement and ownership.

Today evening from 13:30 UTC, Anwesha took a session on Software Licenses 101 in the #dgplug channel on Freenode. There will be more follow up sessions in the coming days.

Link to the article once again

I had organized a one-day workshop based on my book i want 2 do project. tell me wat 2 do at reserved-bit, Pune on Saturday, June 3, 2017. Thanks to Nisha Poyarekar and Siddhesh Poyarekar for providing their makerspace as venue for the workshop.

The objective of the workshop is to share the methodology and best practices on working with Free and Open Source Software projects, and also to guide the participants on career options. Although there is plenty of free documentation (including my own) available on the subject, some people prefer a formal, systematic approach to learning in a private coaching environment. Hence, this workshop is tailored for the same and is made a paid workshop, similar to personal tutoring.

The book has been in circulation for many years. So, I had to give two options - pay only for the workshop, or pay for both the workshop and the book (if they have not already bought the book). I have also kept additional copies of my book at the reserved-bit makerspace if people are interested. I had covered the following topics:

1. Careers with F/OSS
2. “i want 2 do project. tell me wat 2 do” best practices
3. Introduction to Git
4. Hands-on problem solving exercises
5. Real-world project example
6. Goal-driven development

The feedback has been positive and I am sharing the same below:

If you are interested in attending such a workshop, do write to me: author at shakthimaan dot com.

My first step with FOSS was during the summer of 2014, where I got introduced to DGPLUG (Durgapur Linux Users Group). Every year, they conduct a training over IRC covering a wide range of topics. Since then, I've been contributing to different projects, primarily to Mozilla's Gecko Engine. Recently I also started contributing to CPython.

Over this journey as CuriousLearner over the past few years, I've been fortunate enough to collaborate with some of the best engineers, learnt a lot of skills & gained some nice perspective on different technologies by just contributing to Open Source. I owe my learning to them.

I've been always asked this question by my friends, colleagues, and strangers whom I often run into in local meet-ups and conferences.

• Why should I contribute to Open Source
• What's in it for me

So, I thought I would cover this topic from the perspective of a student as well as the perspective of a working professional.

I started contributing to CPython this year from PyCon Pune sprints. That was one of the best PyCon I've ever attended. Since then, I've spent some time in going through documentation, core dev-guide and now I'm still reading about internals of the Python programming language.

I recently contributed an enhancement patch to Python 3.7 which might be back-ported to Python 3.6. Let's understand the scenario and the enhancement:

New contributor to Python 3 might use old Python 2 syntax treating print as a statement rather than a function and then see an error like:

>>> print "hello"
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    print "hello"
                ^
SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'print'

The task was to improve the error message based on different kinds of user input. This shall ensure that we don't only show error to the user but also suggest the correct syntax to be used as a hint. So after the patch being applied, the error message shall say this:

>>> print "hello"
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    print "hello"
                ^
SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'print'. Did you mean print("hello")?

Sounds easy? Right? No, we aren't done yet. This was a simple print statement dealing with just a string. Potentially someone can try to print anything. What if someone wants to print a tuple?

>>> print 4,
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    print 4,
          ^
SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'print'. Did you mean print(4, end=" ")?

So, the correct syntax is suggested to the user according to Python3.

Along with this, there are cases when someone adds soft-spaces, or just use excessive whitespace like:

>>> print    "hello"
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    print    "hello"
                   ^
SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'print'. Did you mean print("hello")?

This was the first patch where I had to deal with C code. It was more of reading and understanding what the current code does. I had to do a complete re-write of this patch two times in a span of just 1.5 days (Thanks to Nick and Serhiy for the quick reviews).

Here's why:

The first time I wrote the patch, I used raw C APIs, which means I used malloc and free for memory allocation and deallocation for manipulating the string input that was received from the user.

While this might work, but there is already a lot of work done by Python core-devs & they've created an entire C API layer. So, in the first review, I was pointed to use this API layer, so I had to re-write the patch. One of the learning I had is that virtually any API can fail. So, it is necessary to always check the results before using them.

Most of the methods from the C-API layer that were used in this patch were dealing with Unicode objects.

Another important learning was to deallocate the previous memory at each check point (if some of the API call fails and there is no memory allocated on heap then deallocate all the previous allocated memory).

Apart from handling the striping of characters that were input on the shell and detecting the tuple syntax, I also wrote test cases for the new feature. In CPython, most of the test cases are written in Python (except a few). Typically in this use case, we only need to check the functionality of the Python layer, so test cases were written in Python.

Let's see how the added feature does what it is intended to do:

// Static helper for setting legacy print error message
static int
_set_legacy_print_statement_msg(PySyntaxErrorObject *self, Py_ssize_t start)
{
    PyObject *strip_sep_obj = PyUnicode_FromString(" \t\r\n");
    if (strip_sep_obj == NULL)
        return -1;

    // PRINT_OFFSET is to remove `print ` word from the data.
    const int PRINT_OFFSET = 6;
    Py_ssize_t text_len = PyUnicode_GET_LENGTH(self->text);
    PyObject *data = PyUnicode_Substring(self->text, PRINT_OFFSET, text_len);

    if (data == NULL) {
        Py_DECREF(strip_sep_obj);
        return -1;
    }
    PyObject *new_data = _PyUnicode_XStrip(data, 2, strip_sep_obj);
    Py_DECREF(data);
    Py_DECREF(strip_sep_obj);

    if (new_data == NULL) {
        return -1;
    }
    // gets the modified text_len after stripping `print `
    text_len = PyUnicode_GET_LENGTH(new_data);
    const char *maybe_end_arg = "";
    if (text_len > 0 && PyUnicode_READ_CHAR(new_data, text_len-1) == ',') {
        maybe_end_arg = " end=\" \"";
    }
    PyObject *error_msg = PyUnicode_FromFormat(
        "Missing parentheses in call to 'print'. Did you mean print(%U%s)?",
        new_data, maybe_end_arg
    );
    Py_DECREF(new_data);
    if (error_msg == NULL)
        return -1;

    Py_XSETREF(self->msg, error_msg);
    return 1;
}

This function returns the following:

• 1 if the error message is successfully set.
• -1 in case any of the C-API fails.

So, first we use strip_sep_obj to define all the symbols that we need to strip from the input received from the user. Next, when we get the string, it would be of the form print "Hello".

PyObject *strip_sep_obj = PyUnicode_FromString(" \t\r\n");
if (strip_sep_obj == NULL)
    return -1;

// PRINT_OFFSET is to remove `print ` word from the data.
const int PRINT_OFFSET = 6;

What we're interested in is about the text after the print and space. That accounts for the PRINT_OFFSET that is set to constant 6.

Next, _PyUnicode_XStrip uses to strip strip_sep_obj from the data we assigned earlier. The 2 in this function is a constant value that implies stripping the input from both sides of the data.

PyObject *new_data = _PyUnicode_XStrip(data, 2, strip_sep_obj);

Next, we get the length of the text and check if the input meant to print a tuple by checking the last character from the Unicode buffer to be equal to string literal ,.

const char *maybe_end_arg = "";
if (text_len > 0 && PyUnicode_READ_CHAR(new_data, text_len-1) == ',') {
    maybe_end_arg = " end=\" \"";
}

After setting up the maybe_end_arg we format the new message and use Py_XSETREF to set the new error_msg to the PySyntaxErrorObject instance.

Py_XSETREF(self->msg, error_msg);

Here is the full patch if you want to see. The meaning of each of the methods used can be easily found from the official documentation.

I hope to write about my learning in more detail and also explain about different parts of the programming language in a future post.

The June Golang Bangalore Meetup was conducted on Saturday, June 17th, 2017. There were around 35-40 people who attended the meetup.

The meetup started at 10:15 with the first talk by Nurali Virani who works at SAP Labs, Bengaluru. He talked about “Understanding Type System In Go”.

Saifi gave an awesome talk about “Working with C code and plugins in Go”. The slides related to his talk can be found here

Umasankar Mukkara is the Co-Founder and CEO at CloudByte Inc. He talked about OpenEBS and their experience with Golang. The slides of his talk could be found here. OpenEBS is an open source project written in Golang. You can find the source code of OpenEBS here.

Satyam Zode who is also a fellow Golang programmer at OpenEBS presented a talk about “Package oriented design in Go”. The slides related to his talk could be found here

I thank Uma, OpenEBS and Nexus Ventures Partners for helping us to organize the June Golang Bangalore Meetup by providing venue and food. There were also a few goodies for the participants by OpenEBS. Fortuanately, this event was recorded and we will be sharing the recorded videos soon when they will be ready.

Back after a long time. It’s been a long time since I blogged. This was mostly because I was busy with different conferences. Yes,I attended three conferences PyCon Pune, FOSSASIA, and PyCon US since the last time I blogged. I would be back writing reports on all the three events and I have a pending third and the final blog post to be done on fedimg.

Now, let me rollback to the topic for which this blog post is meant to be.

11th June 2017, PyLadies Pune organized the meetup for the month of June. The meetup started a bit late with Shilpee Chamoli taking a 101 class on Data Science. The workshop focused on installing dependencies (Jupyter, Pandas, etc), and working on a dataset on ‘survival on the Titanic’. Since few people were having trouble with installing the dependencies, Kushal and a few other people used Azure Notebooks.

Anwesha and I had recorded videos during PyCon US which had messages from Lynn Root, Ewa Jodlowska, Carol Willing, and Jackie Kazil for the PyLadies Pune group members encouraging them on progressively working ahead and helping the community grow.

After lunch, a mini-dev-sprint was planned where the participants would come up with a project idea. Chandan, Praveen, Kushal and me were doing the mentoring. I was mentoring a group who are planning to build a recommendation system for restaurants (as of now). Based on my experience, I shared with them on which are the important things to focus first and follow the principle “release early and release often”. On the sidelines, I was also working on my project “invento”

The meetup ended at around 5 PM in the evening, though few people stayed up late working on the project.