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Dirk Eddelbuettel: drat 0.2.5 on CRAN: Small Updates

Planet Debian - Mon, 2024-10-21 20:38

A new minor release of the drat package arrived on CRAN today, which is just over a year since the previous release. drat stands for drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in early 2015 it has found reasonably widespread adoption among R users because repositories with marked releases is the better way to distribute code.

Because for once it really is as your mother told you: Friends don’t let friends install random git commit snapshots. Properly rolled-up releases it is. Just how CRAN shows us: a model that has demonstrated for over two-and-a-half decades how to do this. And you can too: drat is easy to use, documented by six vignettes and just works. Detailed information about drat is at its documentation site. That said, and ‘these days’, if you mainly care about github code then r-universe is there too, also offering binaries its makes and all that jazz. But sometimes you just want to, or need to, roll a local repository and drat can help you there.

This release contains a small PR (made by Arne Holmin just after the previous release) adding support for an ‘OSflacour’ variable (helpful for macOS). We also corrected an issue with one test file being insufficiently careful of using git2r only when installed, and as usual did a round of maintenance for the package concerning both continuous integration and documentation.

The NEWS file summarises the release as follows:

Changes in drat version 0.2.5 (2024-10-21)

  • Function insertPackage has a new optional argument OSflavour (Arne Holmin in #142)

  • A test file conditions correctly about git2r being present (Dirk)

  • Several smaller packaging updates and enhancements to continuous integration and documentation have been added (Dirk)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More detailed information is on the drat page as well as at the documentation site.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

KDE and Google Summer of Code 2024

Planet KDE - Mon, 2024-10-21 20:00

All but one of KDE's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects are complete. This post will summarize the completed project outcomes. GSoC is a program where people who are students or are new to Free and Open Source software make programming contributions to an open source project.

Projects Arianna

Frameworks

Python bindings for KDE Frameworks:

Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano, implemented Python bindings for KWidgetAddons, KUnitConversion, KCoreAddons, KGuiAddons, KI18n, KNotifications, and KXmlGUI. This was done using Shiboken. In addition, Manuel wrote a tutorial on how to generate Python bindings using Shiboken. The complicated set of merge requests are still being reviewed, and Manuel continues to interact with the KDE community.

KDE Connect

Update SSHD library in KDE Connect Android app

The main aim of ShellWen Chen's project was to update Apache Mina SSHD from 0.14.0 to 2.12.1. The older version has a few listed vulnerabilities. The newer library required additional code to enable it to work on older Android phones, upto Android API 21.

KDE Games

Implementing a computerized opponent for the Mancala variant Bohnenspiel:

João Gouveia created Mankala engine, a library to enable easy creation of Mancala games. The engine contains implementations for two Mancala games, Bohnenspiel and Oware. Both games contain computerized opponents, João also started on a QtQuick graphical user interface. The games are functional, but additional investigation on computerized opponents may help improve their effectiveness.

Kdenlive

Improved subtitling support for Kdenlive:

Kdenlive has gotten improved subtitling support. Chengkun Chen added support for using the Advanced SubStation (ASS) file format and for converting SubRip files to ASS files. To support this format, Chengkun Chen also made subtitling editor improvements. The work has been merged in the main repository. Documentation has been written, and will hopefully be merged soon.

Krita

Creating Pixel Perfect Tool for Krita:

Ken Lo worked on implementing Pixel Perfect lines in Krita. As explained by Ricky Han, such algorithms remove corner pixels from L shaped blocks and ensure the thinnest possible line is 1 pixel wide. Implementing such algorithms well is of use not only in Krita, but also in rendering web graphics where user screen resolutions can vary significantly. The algorithm was implemented to work in close to real time while lines are drawn, rather than as a post processing step. Ken Lo's work has been merged into Krita.

Labplot

Improve Python Interoperability with LabPlot

Israel Galadima worked on improving Python support in LabPlot. Shiboken was used for this. It is now possible to call some of LabPlot functions from Python and integrate these into other applications.

3D Visualization for LabPlot

Kuntal Bar added 3D graphing abilities to LabPlot. This was done using QtGraphs. The work has yet to be merged, but there are many nice examples of 3D plots, for bar charts, scatter and surface plots.

Snaps

Improving Snap Ecosystem in KDE

Snaps are self contained linux application packging formats. Soumyadeep Ghosh worked on improving the tooling necessary to make KDE applications easily available in the Snap Store. In addition, Soumyadeep improved packaging of a number of KDE Snap packages, and packaged MarkNote. Finally, Soumyadeep created Snap KCM, a graphical user interface to manage permissions that Snaps have when running.

Next Steps

The GSoC period is over, for all but one contributor, Pratham Gandhi. A follow up post will summarize contributions from the remaining project. Contributors have enjoyed participating in GSoC and we look forward to their continuing participation in free and open source software communities and in contributing to KDE.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

KDE Plasma 6.2.2, Bugfix Release for October

Planet KDE - Mon, 2024-10-21 20:00

Tuesday, 22 October 2024. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.2.2.

Plasma 6.2 was released in October 2024 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

This release adds a week's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:

  • KWin Backends/drm: leave all outputs disabled by default, including VR headsets. Commit. Fixes bug #493148
  • KWin Set WAYLAND_DISPLAY before starting wayland server. Commit.
  • Plasma Audio Volume Control: Fix text display for auto_null device. Commit. Fixes bug #494324
View full changelog
Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

FSF News: FSF associate members to assist in review of current board members

GNU Planet! - Mon, 2024-10-21 16:00
Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

parallel @ Savannah: GNU Parallel 20241022 ('Sinwar Nasrallah') released [stable]

GNU Planet! - Mon, 2024-10-21 15:31

GNU Parallel 20241022 ('Sinwar Nasrallah') has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4

Quote of the month:

  GNU Parallel is one of the most helpful tools I've been using recently, and it's just something like: parallel -j4 'gzip {}' ::: folder/*.csv
     -- Milton Pividori @miltondp@twitter
 
New in this release:

  • No new features. This is a candidate for a stable release.
  • Bug fixes and man page updates.


News about GNU Parallel:


GNU Parallel - For people who live life in the parallel lane.

If you like GNU Parallel record a video testimonial: Say who you are, what you use GNU Parallel for, how it helps you, and what you like most about it. Include a command that uses GNU Parallel if you feel like it.


About GNU Parallel


GNU Parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one or more computers. A job can be a single command or a small script that has to be run for each of the lines in the input. The typical input is a list of files, a list of hosts, a list of users, a list of URLs, or a list of tables. A job can also be a command that reads from a pipe. GNU Parallel can then split the input and pipe it into commands in parallel.

If you use xargs and tee today you will find GNU Parallel very easy to use as GNU Parallel is written to have the same options as xargs. If you write loops in shell, you will find GNU Parallel may be able to replace most of the loops and make them run faster by running several jobs in parallel. GNU Parallel can even replace nested loops.

GNU Parallel makes sure output from the commands is the same output as you would get had you run the commands sequentially. This makes it possible to use output from GNU Parallel as input for other programs.

For example you can run this to convert all jpeg files into png and gif files and have a progress bar:

  parallel --bar convert {1} {1.}.{2} ::: *.jpg ::: png gif

Or you can generate big, medium, and small thumbnails of all jpeg files in sub dirs:

  find . -name '*.jpg' |
    parallel convert -geometry {2} {1} {1//}/thumb{2}_{1/} :::: - ::: 50 100 200

You can find more about GNU Parallel at: http://www.gnu.org/s/parallel/

You can install GNU Parallel in just 10 seconds with:

    $ (wget -O - pi.dk/3 || lynx -source pi.dk/3 || curl pi.dk/3/ || \
       fetch -o - http://pi.dk/3 ) > install.sh
    $ sha1sum install.sh | grep 883c667e01eed62f975ad28b6d50e22a
    12345678 883c667e 01eed62f 975ad28b 6d50e22a
    $ md5sum install.sh | grep cc21b4c943fd03e93ae1ae49e28573c0
    cc21b4c9 43fd03e9 3ae1ae49 e28573c0
    $ sha512sum install.sh | grep ec113b49a54e705f86d51e784ebced224fdff3f52
    79945d9d 250b42a4 2067bb00 99da012e c113b49a 54e705f8 6d51e784 ebced224
    fdff3f52 ca588d64 e75f6033 61bd543f d631f592 2f87ceb2 ab034149 6df84a35
    $ bash install.sh

Watch the intro video on http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL284C9FF2488BC6D1

Walk through the tutorial (man parallel_tutorial). Your command line will love you for it.

When using programs that use GNU Parallel to process data for publication please cite:

O. Tange (2018): GNU Parallel 2018, March 2018, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1146014.

If you like GNU Parallel:

  • Give a demo at your local user group/team/colleagues
  • Post the intro videos on Reddit/Diaspora*/forums/blogs/ Identi.ca/Google+/Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin/mailing lists
  • Get the merchandise https://gnuparallel.threadless.com/designs/gnu-parallel
  • Request or write a review for your favourite blog or magazine
  • Request or build a package for your favourite distribution (if it is not already there)
  • Invite me for your next conference


If you use programs that use GNU Parallel for research:

  • Please cite GNU Parallel in you publications (use --citation)


If GNU Parallel saves you money:



About GNU SQL


GNU sql aims to give a simple, unified interface for accessing databases through all the different databases' command line clients. So far the focus has been on giving a common way to specify login information (protocol, username, password, hostname, and port number), size (database and table size), and running queries.

The database is addressed using a DBURL. If commands are left out you will get that database's interactive shell.

When using GNU SQL for a publication please cite:

O. Tange (2011): GNU SQL - A Command Line Tool for Accessing Different Databases Using DBURLs, ;login: The USENIX Magazine, April 2011:29-32.


About GNU Niceload


GNU niceload slows down a program when the computer load average (or other system activity) is above a certain limit. When the limit is reached the program will be suspended for some time. If the limit is a soft limit the program will be allowed to run for short amounts of time before being suspended again. If the limit is a hard limit the program will only be allowed to run when the system is below the limit.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Talking Drupal: Talking Drupal #472 - Access Policy API

Planet Drupal - Mon, 2024-10-21 15:00

Today we are talking about Access Policy API, What it does, and How you can use it with guest Kristiaan Van den Eynde. We’ll also cover Visitors as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/472

Topics
  • What is the Access Policy API
  • Why does Drupal need the Access Policy API
  • How did Drupal handle access before
  • How does the Access Policy API interact with roles
  • Does a module exist that shows a UI
  • What is the difference between Policy Based Access Control (PBAC), Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) and Role Based Access Control (RBAC)
  • How does Access Policy API work with PBAC, ABAC and RBAC
  • Can you apply an access policy via a recipe
  • Is there a roadmap
  • What was it like going through pitchburg
  • How can people get involved
Resources Guests

Kristiaan Van den Eynde - kristiaanvandeneynde

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Aubrey Sambor - star-shaped.org starshaped

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

  • Brief description:
    • Have you ever wanted a Drupal-native solution for tracking website visitors and their behavior? There’s a module for that
  • Module name/project name:
  • Brief history
    • How old: created in Mar 2009 by gashev, though recent releases are by Steven Ayers (bluegeek9)
    • Versions available: 8.x-2.19, which works with Drupal 10 and 11
  • Maintainership
    • Actively maintained
    • Security coverage
    • Test coverage
    • Documentation guide is available
    • Number of open issues: 20 open issues, none of which are bugs against the 8.x branch
  • Usage stats:
    • Over 6,000 sites
  • Module features and usage
    • A benefit of using a Drupal-native solution is that you retain full ownership over your visitor data. Not sharing that data with third parties can be important for data protection regulations, as well as data privacy concerns.
    • You also have a variety of reports you can access directly within the Drupal UI, including top pages, referrers, and more
    • There is a submodule for geoip lookups using Maxmind, if you also want reporting on what region, country, or city your visitors hail from
    • It provides drush commands to download a geoip database, and then update your data based on geoip lookups using that database
    • It should be mentioned that the downside of using Drupal as your analytics solution is the potential performance impact and also a likely uptick in usage for hosts that charge based on the number of dynamic requests served
Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Sahil Dhiman: Free Software Mirrors in India

Planet Debian - Mon, 2024-10-21 14:29

List of public mirrors in India. Location discovered basis personal knowledge, traces or GeoIP. Mirrors which aren’t accessible outside their own ASN are excluded.

North India East India South India West India CDN (or behind one)

Let me know if I’m missing someone or something is amiss.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

FSF Blogs: FSD meeting recap 2024-10-18

GNU Planet! - Mon, 2024-10-21 13:47
Check out the important work our volunteers accomplished at today's Free Software Directory (FSD) IRC meeting.
Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

FSD meeting recap 2024-10-18

FSF Blogs - Mon, 2024-10-21 13:47
Check out the important work our volunteers accomplished at today's Free Software Directory (FSD) IRC meeting.
Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Real Python: Python's property(): Add Managed Attributes to Your Classes

Planet Python - Mon, 2024-10-21 10:00

With Python’s property(), you can create managed attributes in your classes. You can use managed attributes when you need to modify an attribute’s internal implementation and don’t want to change the class’s public API. Providing stable APIs will prevent you from breaking your users’ code when they rely on your code.

Properties are arguably the most popular way to create managed attributes quickly and in the purest Pythonic style.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to:

  • Create managed attributes or properties in your classes
  • Perform lazy attribute evaluation and provide computed attributes
  • Make your classes Pythonic using properties instead of setter and getter methods
  • Create read-only and read-write properties
  • Create consistent and backward-compatible APIs for your classes

You’ll also write practical examples that use property() for validating input data, computing attribute values dynamically, logging your code, and more. To get the most out of this tutorial, you should know the basics of object-oriented programming, classes, and decorators in Python.

Get Your Code: Click here to download the free sample code that shows you how to use Python’s property() to add managed attributes to your classes.

Take the Quiz: Test your knowledge with our interactive “Python's property(): Add Managed Attributes to Your Classes” quiz. You’ll receive a score upon completion to help you track your learning progress:

Interactive Quiz

Python's property(): Add Managed Attributes to Your Classes

In this quiz, you'll test your understanding of Python's property(). With this knowledge, you'll be able to create managed attributes in your classes, perform lazy attribute evaluation, provide computed attributes, and more.

Managing Attributes in Your Classes

When you define a class in an object-oriented programming language, you’ll probably end up with some instance and class attributes. In other words, you’ll end up with variables that are accessible through the instance, class, or even both, depending on the language. Attributes represent and hold the internal state of a given object, which you’ll often need to access and mutate.

Typically, you have at least two ways to access and mutate an attribute. Either you can access and mutate the attribute directly or you can use methods. Methods are functions attached to a given class. They provide the behaviors and actions that an object can perform with its internal data and attributes.

If you expose attributes to the user, then they become part of the class’s public API. This means that your users will access and mutate them directly in their code. The problem comes when you need to change the internal implementation of a given attribute.

Say you’re working on a Circle class and add an attribute called .radius, making it public. You finish coding the class and ship it to your end users. They start using Circle in their code to create a lot of awesome projects and applications. Good job!

Now suppose that you have an important user that comes to you with a new requirement. They don’t want Circle to store the radius any longer. Instead, they want a public .diameter attribute.

At this point, removing .radius to start using .diameter could break the code of some of your other users. You need to manage this situation in a way other than removing .radius.

Programming languages such as Java and C++ encourage you to never expose your attributes to avoid this kind of problem. Instead, you should provide getter and setter methods, also known as accessors and mutators, respectively. These methods offer a way to change the internal implementation of your attributes without changing your public API.

Note: Getter and setter methods are often considered an anti-pattern and a signal of poor object-oriented design. The main argument behind this proposition is that these methods break encapsulation. They allow you to access and mutate the components of your objects from the outside.

These programming languages need getter and setter methods because they don’t have a suitable way to change an attribute’s internal implementation when a given requirement changes. Changing the internal implementation would require an API modification, which can break your end users’ code.

The Getter and Setter Approach in Python

Technically, there’s nothing that stops you from using getter and setter methods in Python. Here’s a quick example that shows how this approach would look:

Python point_v1.py class Point: def __init__(self, x, y): self._x = x self._y = y def get_x(self): return self._x def set_x(self, value): self._x = value def get_y(self): return self._y def set_y(self, value): self._y = value Copied!

In this example, you create a Point class with two non-public attributes ._x and ._y to hold the Cartesian coordinates of the point at hand.

Note: Python doesn’t have the notion of access modifiers, such as private, protected, and public, to restrict access to attributes and methods. In Python, the distinction is between public and non-public class members.

If you want to signal that a given attribute or method is non-public, then you have to use the well-known Python convention of prefixing the name with an underscore (_). That’s the reason behind the naming of the attributes ._x and ._y.

Note that this is just a convention. It doesn’t stop you and other programmers from accessing the attributes using dot notation, as in obj._attr. However, it’s bad practice to violate this convention.

To access and mutate the value of either ._x or ._y, you can use the corresponding getter and setter methods. Go ahead and save the above definition of Point in a Python module and import the class into an interactive session. Then run the following code:

Python >>> from point_v1 import Point >>> point = Point(12, 5) >>> point.get_x() 12 >>> point.get_y() 5 >>> point.set_x(42) >>> point.get_x() 42 >>> # Non-public attributes are still accessible >>> point._x 42 >>> point._y 5 Copied!

With .get_x() and .get_y(), you can access the current values of ._x and ._y. You can use the setter method to store a new value in the corresponding managed attribute. From the two final examples, you can confirm that Python doesn’t restrict access to non-public attributes. Whether or not you access them directly is up to you.

Read the full article at https://realpython.com/python-property/ »

[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

SystemSeed.com: Prestigious medical journal - The Lancet - features SystemSeed project

Planet Drupal - Mon, 2024-10-21 09:50
Prestigious medical journal - The Lancet - features SystemSeed project

Elise West, Evgeniy Maslovskiy and Andrey Yurtaev receive co-author credits for their work on the World Health Organization's EQUIP project

Tamsin Fox-Davies Mon, 10/21/2024 - 13:50
Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Sven Hoexter: Terraform: Making Use of Precondition Checks

Planet Debian - Mon, 2024-10-21 09:26

I'm in the unlucky position to have to deal with GitHub. Thus I've a terraform module in a project which deals with populating organization secrets in our GitHub organization, and assigning repositories access to those secrets.

Since the GitHub terraform provider internally works mostly with repository IDs, not slugs (this human readable organization/repo format), we've to do some mapping in between. In my case it looks like this:

#tfvars Input for Module org_secrets = { "SECRET_A" = { repos = [ "infra-foo", "infra-baz", "deployment-foobar", ] "SECRET_B" = { repos = [ "job-abc", "job-xyz", ] } } # Module Code /* Limitation: The GH search API which is queried returns at most 1000 results. Thus whenever we reach that limit this approach will no longer work. The query is also intentionally limited to internal repositories right now. */ data "github_repositories" "repos" { query = "org:myorg archived:false -is:public -is:private" include_repo_id = true } /* The properties of the github_repositories.repos data source queried above contains only lists. Thus we've to manually establish a mapping between the repository names we need as a lookup key later on, and the repository id we got in another list from the search query above. */ locals { # Assemble the set of repository names we need repo_ids for repos = toset(flatten([for v in var.org_secrets : v.repos])) # Walk through all names in the query result list and check # if they're also in our repo set. If yes add the repo name -> id # mapping to our resulting map repos_and_ids = { for i, v in data.github_repositories.repos.names : v => data.github_repositories.repos.repo_ids[i] if contains(local.repos, v) } } resource "github_actions_organization_secret" "org_secrets" { for_each = var.org_secrets secret_name = each.key visibility = "selected" # the logic how the secret value is sourced is omitted here plaintext_value = data.xxx selected_repository_ids = [ for r in each.value.repos : local.repos_and_ids[r] if can(local.repos_and_ids[r]) ] }

Now if we do something bad, delete a repository and forget to remove it from the configuration for the module, we receive some error message that a (numeric) repository ID could not be found. Pretty much useless for the average user because you've to figure out which repository is still in the configuration list, but got deleted recently.

Luckily terraform supports since version 1.2 precondition checks, which we can use in an output-block to provide the information which repository is missing. What we need is the set of missing repositories and the validation condition:

locals { # Debug facility in combination with an output and precondition check # There we can report which repository we still have in our configuration # but no longer get as a result from the data provider query missing_repos = setsubtract(local.repos, data.github_repositories.repos.names) } # Debug facility - If we can not find every repository in our # search query result, report those repos as an error output "missing_repos" { value = local.missing_repos precondition { condition = length(local.missing_repos) == 0 error_message = format("Repos in config missing from resultset: %v", local.missing_repos) } }

Now you only have to be aware that GitHub is GitHub and the TF provider has open bugs, but is not supported by GitHub and you will encounter inconsistent results. But it works, even if your terraform apply failed that way.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Kdenlive 24.08.2 released

Planet KDE - Mon, 2024-10-21 06:09

Kdenlive 24.08.2 is out with many fixes to a wide range of bugs and regressions.

  • Fix title producer update on edit undo. Commit. Fixes bug #494142.
  • Fix typo in dance.xml. Commit.
  • Fix single item(s) move. Commit.
  • Fix cycle effects playling timeline and sometimes broken after reopening project. Commit.
  • Fix recent regression breaking all sort of things when opening projects. Commit.
  • Fix crash when dragging clip and using mouse wheel. Commit.
  • Don’t play when clicking monitor container if disabled in settings. Commit.
  • Fix effect zones lost on project reopening. Commit.
  • Various fixes for bin clip effects. Commit.
  • Disable check for ghost effects that currently removes valid effects. Commit.
  • Detect and fix track producers with incorrect effects. Commit.
  • Fix bin effects sometimes not correctly removed from timeline instance. Commit.
  • Don’t try to build clone effect it if does not apply to the target. Commit.
  • Don’t unnecessarily check MLT tractors. Commit.
  • Fix crash opening file with missing clips. Commit.
  • Fix crash on project close. Commit.
  • Fix compilation. Commit.
  • Fix possible crash opening an interlaced project. Commit.
  • Fix on monitor seek to next/previous keyframe buttons. Commit.
  • Fix crash editing keyframes in a bin clip with grouped effects enabled. Commit.
  • Don’t try to connect to dbus jobview on command line rendering. Commit.
  • Fix Qt5 compilation. Commit.
  • FIx looping through clips in project monitor effect scene. Commit.
  • Fix loop selected clip. Commit.

The post Kdenlive 24.08.2 released appeared first on Kdenlive.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

GNU Guix: Build User Takeover Vulnerability

GNU Planet! - Mon, 2024-10-21 04:55

A security issue has been identified in guix-daemon which allows for a local user to gain the privileges of any of the build users and subsequently use this to manipulate the output of any build. Your are strongly advised to upgrade your daemon now (see instructions below), especially on multi-user systems.

This exploit requires the ability to start a derivation build and the ability to run arbitrary code with access to the store in the root PID namespace on the machine the build occurs on. As such, this represents an increased risk primarily to multi-user systems and systems using dedicated privilege-separation users for various daemons: without special sandboxing measures, any process of theirs can take advantage of this vulnerability.

Vulnerability

For a very long time, guix-daemon has helpfully made the outputs of failed derivation builds available at the same location they were at in the build container. This has aided greatly especially in situations where test suites require the package to already be installed in order to run, as it allows one to re-run the test suite interactively outside of the container when built with --keep-failed. This transferral of store items from inside the chroot to the real store was implemented with a simple rename, and no modification of the store item or any files it may contain.

If an attacker starts a build of a derivation that creates a binary with the setuid and/or setgid bit in an output directory, then, and the build fails, that binary will be accessible unaltered for anybody on the system. The attacker or a cooperating user can then execute the binary, gain the privileges, and from there use a combination of signals and procfs to freeze a builder, open any file it has open via /proc/$PID/fd, and overwrite it with whatever it wants. This manipulation of builds can happen regardless of which user started the build, so it can work not only for producing compromised outputs for commonly-used programs before anybody else uses them, but also for compromising any builds another user happens to start.

A related vulnerability was also discovered concerning the outputs of successful builds. These were moved - also via rename() - outside of the container prior to having their permissions, ownership, and timestamps canonicalized. This means that there also exists a window of time for a successful build's outputs during which a setuid/setgid binary can be executed.

In general, any time that a build user running a build for some submitter can get a setuid/setgid binary to a place the submitter can execute it, it is possible for the submitter to use it to take over the build user. This situation always occurs when --disable-chroot is passed to guix-daemon. This holds even in the case where there are no dedicated build users, and builds happen under the same user the daemon runs as, as happens during make check in the guix repository. Consequently, if a permissive umask that allows execute permission for untrusted users on directories all the way to a user's guix checkout is used, an attacker can use that user's test-environment daemon to gain control over their user while make check is running.

Mitigation

This security issue has been fixed by two commits. Users should make sure they have updated to the second commit to be protected from this vulnerability. Upgrade instructions are in the following section. If there is a possibility that a failed build has left a setuid/setgid binary lying around in the store by accident, run guix gc to remove all failed build outputs.

The fix was accomplished by sanitizing the permissions of all files in a failed build output prior to moving it to the store, and also by waiting to move successful build outputs to the store until after their permissions had been canonicalized. The sanitizing was done in such a way as to preserve as many non-security-critical properties of failed build outputs as possible to aid in debugging. After applying these two commits, the guix package in Guix was updated so that guix-daemon deployed using it would use the fixed version.

If you are using --disable-chroot, whether with dedicated build users or not, make sure that access to your daemon's socket is restricted to trusted users. This particularly affects anyone running make check and anyone running on GNU/Hurd. The former should either manually remove execute permission for untrusted users on their guix checkout or apply this patch, which restricts access to the test-environment daemon to the user running the tests. The latter should adjust the ownership and permissions of /var/guix/daemon-socket, which can be done for Guix System users using the new socket-directory-{perms,group,user} fields in this patch.

A proof of concept is available at the end of this post. One can run this code with:

guix repl -- setuid-exposure-vuln-check.scm

This will output whether the current guix-daemon being used is vulnerable or not. If it is vulnerable, the last line will contain your system is not vulnerable, otherwise the last line will contain YOUR SYSTEM IS VULNERABLE.

Upgrading

Due to the severity of this security advisory, we strongly recommend all users to upgrade their guix-daemon immediately.

For Guix System, the procedure is to reconfigure the system after a guix pull, either restarting guix-daemon or rebooting. For example:

guix pull sudo guix system reconfigure /run/current-system/configuration.scm sudo herd restart guix-daemon

where /run/current-system/configuration.scm is the current system configuration but could, of course, be replaced by a system configuration file of a user's choice.

For Guix running as a package manager on other distributions, one needs to guix pull with sudo, as the guix-daemon runs as root, and restart the guix-daemon service, as documented. For example, on a system using systemd to manage services, run:

sudo --login guix pull sudo systemctl restart guix-daemon.service

Note that for users with their distro's package of Guix (as opposed to having used the install script) you may need to take other steps or upgrade the Guix package as per other packages on your distro. Please consult the relevant documentation from your distro or contact the package maintainer for additional information or questions.

Conclusion

Even with the sandboxing features of modern kernels, it can be quite challenging to synthesize a situation in which two users on the same system who are determined to cooperate nevertheless cannot. Guix has an especially difficult job because it needs to not only realize such a situation, but also maintain the ability to interact with both users itself, while not allowing them to cooperate through itself in unintended ways. Keeping failed build outputs around for debugging introduced a vulnerability, but finding that vulnerability because of it enabled the discovery of an additional vulnerability that would have existed anyway, and prompted the use of mechanisms for securing access to the guix daemon.

I would like to thank Ludovic Courtès for giving feedback on these vulnerabilities and their fixes — discussion of which led to discovering the vulnerable time window with successful build outputs — and also for helping me to discover that my email server was broken.

Proof of Concept

Below is code to check if your guix-daemon is vulnerable to this exploit. Save this file as setuid-exposure-vuln-check.scm and run following the instructions above, in "Mitigation."

(use-modules (guix) (srfi srfi-34)) (define maybe-setuid-file ;; Attempt to create a setuid file in the store, with one of the build ;; users as its owner. (computed-file "maybe-setuid-file" #~(begin (call-with-output-file #$output (const #t)) (chmod #$output #o6000) ;; Failing causes guix-daemon to copy the output from ;; its temporary location back to the store. (exit 1)))) (with-store store (let* ((drv (run-with-store store (lower-object maybe-setuid-file))) (out (derivation->output-path drv))) (guard (c (#t (if (zero? (logand #o6000 (stat:perms (stat out)))) (format #t "~a is not setuid: your system is not \ vulnerable.~%" out) (format #t "~a is setuid: YOUR SYSTEM IS VULNERABLE. Run 'guix gc' to remove that file and upgrade.~%" out)))) (build-things store (list (derivation-file-name drv))))))
Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Python Bytes: #406 What's on Django TV tonight?

Planet Python - Mon, 2024-10-21 04:00
<strong>Topics covered in this episode:</strong><br> <ul> <li><a href="https://opensourcepledge.com?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>Open Source Pledge</strong></a></li> <li><strong>Jeff Triplet's <a href="https://djangotv.com?featured_on=pythonbytes">DjangoTV</a></strong></li> <li><strong><a href="https://peps.python.org/pep-0735/?featured_on=pythonbytes">PEP 735 – Dependency Groups in pyproject.toml</a></strong></li> <li><strong><a href="https://livereload.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html?featured_on=pythonbytes">livereload</a></strong></li> <li><strong>Extras</strong></li> <li><strong>Joke</strong></li> </ul><a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzXG6cRP2Mk' style='font-weight: bold;'data-umami-event="Livestream-Past" data-umami-event-episode="406">Watch on YouTube</a><br> <p><strong>About the show</strong></p> <p>Sponsored by ScoutAPM: <a href="https://pythonbytes.fm/scout"><strong>pythonbytes.fm/scout</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Connect with the hosts</strong></p> <ul> <li>Michael: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@mkennedy"><strong>@mkennedy@fosstodon.org</strong></a></li> <li>Brian: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@brianokken"><strong>@brianokken@fosstodon.org</strong></a></li> <li>Show: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@pythonbytes"><strong>@pythonbytes@fosstodon.org</strong></a></li> </ul> <p>Join us on YouTube at <a href="https://pythonbytes.fm/stream/live"><strong>pythonbytes.fm/live</strong></a> to be part of the audience. Usually <strong>Monday</strong> at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.</p> <p>Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to <a href="https://pythonbytes.fm/friends-of-the-show">our friends of the show list</a>, we'll never share it. </p> <p><strong>Brian #1:</strong> <a href="https://opensourcepledge.com?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>Open Source Pledge</strong></a></p> <ul> <li>Learned about this because of this post <ul> <li><a href="https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2024/oct/08/why-django-supports-the-open-source-pledge/?featured_on=pythonbytes">Why Django supports the Open Source Pledge</a></li> </ul></li> <li>Steps <ul> <li>Pay Open Source maintainers. <ul> <li>Min to participate is 2k/year/dev at your company</li> </ul></li> <li>Self-report annually <ul> <li>Publish a blog post outlining your payments</li> </ul></li> </ul></li> <li><a href="https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/10/14/mixing-oss-and-money/?featured_on=pythonbytes">Armin’s post</a> about launching Open Source Pledge and mixing money with open source</li> </ul> <p><strong>Michael #2:</strong> Jeff Triplet's <a href="https://djangotv.com?featured_on=pythonbytes">DjangoTV</a></p> <ul> <li>A nice aggregation of lots of Django conference talks</li> <li>Filter by conference</li> <li>Good search as well</li> </ul> <p><strong>Brian #3:</strong> <a href="https://peps.python.org/pep-0735/?featured_on=pythonbytes">PEP 735 – Dependency Groups in pyproject.toml</a></p> <ul> <li>Author: Stephen Rosen, Sponsor: Brett Cannon, PEP-Delegate: Paul Moore</li> <li>Accepted. Resolotion Oct 10, 2024</li> <li>“This PEP specifies a mechanism for storing package requirements in pyproject.toml files such that they are not included in any built distribution of the project.”</li> <li>Allow us to define named groups of dependencies that can be independent of the main project.</li> <li><p>ex:</p> <pre><code>[dependency-groups] test = ["pytest", "coverage"] docs = ["sphinx", "sphinx-rtd-theme"] typing = ["mypy", "types-requests"] typing-test = [{include-group = "typing"}, {include-group = "test"}, "useful-types"] </code></pre></li> <li><p>“might” work like this: pip install --dependency-groups=test,typing</p> <ul> <li>but tool venders are able to define how they use groups. Of course.</li> </ul></li> <li>Similar solutions <ul> <li>multiple requirements.txt files: requirements_test.txt, requirements_docs.txt, etc. <ul> <li>no standard naming convention, not standardized </li> </ul></li> <li>package extras: <ul> <li>not gauranteed to be statically defined (TIL)</li> <li>additional to main dependencies, so not independent</li> </ul></li> </ul></li> </ul> <p><strong>Michael #4:</strong> <a href="https://livereload.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html?featured_on=pythonbytes">livereload</a></p> <ul> <li>Example from talkpython.fm: <a href="https://gist.github.com/mikeckennedy/4e1378477a6d174aa8d59921f8db89c3?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>asset_bundler_watcher.py</strong></a></li> <li><a href="https://livereload.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html?featured_on=pythonbytes">The docs are sparse</a>, so see the gist above</li> </ul> <p><strong>Extras</strong> </p> <p>Brian:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://kjaymiller.com/blog/personal-blogs-are-no-longer-personal-when-ai-gets-too-involved.html?featured_on=pythonbytes">Personal Blogs are no longer personal when AI gets too involved</a> - KJayMiller</li> <li><a href="https://stefaniemolin.com/articles/devx/pre-commit/exif-stripper/?featured_on=pythonbytes">Mind Your Image Metadata</a> - Stefanie Molin</li> </ul> <p>Michael:</p> <ul> <li>14% of our listeners are in Germany, thanks Germany! <ul> <li>Prost!</li> </ul></li> <li><a href="https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/?featured_on=pythonbytes">Hetzner comes to the US</a></li> </ul> <p><strong>Joke:</strong> </p> <ul> <li>A programmer’s partner asks them: “Would you go get a loaf of bread from the store? And if they have eggs, get a dozen.” </li> <li>A while later, the programmer returns with 12 loaves of bread and says “They had eggs.” <ul> <li>From https://savvyprogrammer.io/software-jokes/</li> </ul></li> </ul>
Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Akademy 2025 Call for Hosts

Planet KDE - Mon, 2024-10-21 03:55

If you want to contribute to KDE in a significant way (beyond coding), here is your opportunity — help us organize Akademy 2025!

We are seeking hosts for Akademy 2025, which will occur in June, July, August, or September. This is your chance to bring KDE’s biggest event to your city! Download the Call for Hosts guide and submit your proposal to akademy-proposals@kde.org by December 1, 2024.

Feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns! We are here to help you organise a successful event and are here to offer you any advice, guidance, or help you need. Let’s work together to make Akademy 2025 an event to remember.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Zato Blog: HL7 FHIR Security with Basic Auth, OAuth and SSL/TLS

Planet Python - Mon, 2024-10-21 03:43
HL7 FHIR Security with Basic Auth, OAuth and SSL/TLS 2024-10-21, by Dariusz Suchojad HL7 FHIR Security

Preliminary reading: HL7 FHIR Integrations in Python

FHIR servers offer their APIs using REST, which in turn means that they are HTTP servers under the hood. As a result, a few common security mechanisms can be employed to secure access to the servers when you invoke them.

  • Basic Auth
  • OAuth
  • SSL/TLS encryption

When you integrate with a FHIR server, consult with its maintainers what of these, if any, should be used.

Note that Basic Auth and OAuth, when used over HTTP, are mutually exclusive. The HTTP protocol reserves only one header, called Authorization, for the authorization credentials and there is no standard way in the protocol to use more than one authorization mechanism.

On the other hand, the SSL/TLS encryption is independent of the credentials used and can be employed with Basic Auth, OAuth, or in scenarios when no authorization header is sent at all.

This is why, when you create or update a FHIR connection, you can set Basic Auth or OAuth and SSL/TLS options independently, as in the screenshot below:

Basic Auth

Basic Auth is a combination of username and password credentials. They are allocated in advance by the maintainers of a FHIR server.

To use them in your integrations, create a new Basic Auth definition in the Dashboard, set its password, and assign it to an existing or new outgoing FHIR connection. No restarts nor reloads are required.

OAuth

Authentication with OAuth is built around a notion of short-lived tokens, which are simple strings. Your Zato server has credentials, much like a username and password although they are called a client ID and secret, based on which an authentication server issues tokens that let Zato prove that in fact it does have the correct credentials and that it is allowed to invoke a particular API as it is defined through scopes.

Scopes can be likened to permissions to access a subset of resources from a FHIR server. When Zato receives a token from an authentication server the token is inherently linked to specific scopes within which it can interact with the FHIR server.

That tokens are short-lived means that they need to be refreshed periodically, e.g. at least once per hour Zato needs to ask the authentication server for a new token based on its credentials. This process takes place under the hood and requires no configuration on your part.

To use OAuth in your integrations, create a new OAuth definition in the Dashboard, set its secret, and assign it to an existing or new outgoing FHIR connection. No restarts nor reloads are required.

SSL/TLS encryption

If the FHIR server that a connection points to uses SSL/TLS then a question arises of how to validate the certificate of the Certificate Authority (CA) that signed the certificate that the FHIR server uses. There are several options:

  • Skip validation - the certificate will not be validated at all and it will be always accepted.
  • Default bundle - the certificate will have to belong to one of the publicly recognized CAs. The bundle contains the same certificates that common web browsers do so this option is good if the FHIR server is available in the public Internet, e.g. https://fhir.example.com
  • Custom bundle - if the FHIR server's certificate was signed by an internal, non-public CA then the CA's certificate bundle, in the PEM format, can be uploaded through the Dashboard to make it possible to choose it when the FHIR connection is being created or updated.

Next steps:

➤ Read about how to use Python to build and integrate enterprise APIs that your tests will cover
➤ Python API integration tutorial
➤ Python Integration platform as a Service (iPaaS)
➤ What is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)? What is SOA?

More blog posts➤
Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

SystemSeed.com: Understanding the fundamentals of Single Sign-On systems (SSOs)

Planet Drupal - Mon, 2024-10-21 03:08
Understanding the fundamentals of Single Sign-On systems (SSOs)

Single-Sign On (SSO) is a useful tool for organisations to maintain security, whilst improving the user experience for people who need to log in to multiple tools. In this article, SystemSeed CTO Evgeniy Maslovskiy explains how SSOs work, and how to get the most out of yours.

Evgeniy Maslovskiy Mon, 10/21/2024 - 07:08
Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Julien Tayon: Hello world part II : actually recoding print

Planet Python - Mon, 2024-10-21 01:10
In part I we explored the pre-requisite in order to code print : having a grasp on the framebuffer.

Here, we are gonna deep inside one of the most overlooked object oriented abastraction : a file and actually print what we can of hello world in 100 lines of code.

The file handler and the file descriptor

These two abstractions are the low level and high level abstractions of the same thing : a view on something more complex which access has been encapsulated in generic methods. Actually when you code a framebuffer driver you provide function pointers that are specialized to your device and you may omit those common to the class. This is done with a double lookup on the major node, minor node number. Of those « generic » methods you have : seek, write, tell, truncate, open, read, close ...
The file handler in python also handles extra bytes (pun) of facilities : like character encoding, stats, and buffering.

Here, we work with the low level abstraction : the file which we access with fileno through its file descriptor. And thanks to this abstraction, you don't care if the underlying implementation fragments the file itself (ex: on a hard drive), you can magically always ask without caring for the gory details to read any arbitrary block or chararacters at any given position.

Two of the most used methods on files here are seek and write.

The file descriptor method write is sensitive to the positionning set by seek. Hence, we can write a line, and position ourselves one line below to write the next line in a character.

matrices as a view of a row based array

When I speak of rows and columns I evocate abstractions that are not related to the framebuffer.

The coordinates are an abstraction we build for convenience to say I want to write from this line at this column.
And since human beings bug after 2 dimensions we split the last dimnension in a vector of dimension 4 called a pixel.
get_at function illustrates our use of this trick to position the (invisible) cursor at any given position on the screen expressed for clarity in size of glyphes.
We could actually code all this exercice through a 3D view of the framebuffer. I just wouldn't be able to pack the code in less than 100 lines of code and would introduce useless abstractions.

But if you have doubt on the numerous seek I do and why I mutiply lines and columns value the way I do check the preceding link for an understanding of raw based array nth matricial dimensionnal views.

fonts, chars glyphs...

Here we are gonna take matrices defining the glyphes (what you actually see on screen) by 8x8 = 64 1D array and map them on the screen with put_char. Put char does a little bit of magic by relying on python to do the chararcter to glyph conversion through the dict lookup that expecting strings does a de factor codepoint to glyph conversion without having to pass the codepoint conversion.

The set of characters to glyphs conversion with their common property is a font.

The hidden console

The console is an abstraction that keeps track of the global states such as : what is the current line we print at. Thus, here, being lazy I use the global variables instead of a singleton named « console » or « term » to keep track of them. But first and foremost, these « abstractions » are just expectations we share in a common mental mode. Like we expect « print » to add a newline at the end of the string and begin the printing at the next line.

The to be finished example

I limited the code to 100 lines so that it's fairly readable. I let as an exercise the following points :
  • encoding the missing glyphes in the font to actually be able to write "hello world!",
  • handling the edge case of reaching the bottom of the screen,
I want to point out the true python print function is WAY MORE COMPLEX than this terse example and also handle magic conversion from memory objects to their string counterpart (like integers that are converted to their decimal representation), it handles buffering, encoding, and so much more. This is merely a toy to dive into the complexity of the mission at hand.
This example is a part of a project to write « hello world » on the framebuffer in numerous languages, bash included.

Annexe : the code

#!/usr/bin/env python3 from struct import pack from os import SEEK_CUR, lseek as seek, write w,h =map(int, open("/sys/class/graphics/fb0/virtual_size").read().split(",")) so_pixel = 4 stride = w * so_pixel encode = lambda b,g,r,a : pack("4B",b,g,r,a) font = { "height":8, "width":8, 'void' : [ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, ], "l":[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, ], "o": [ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0], "h": [ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0], } def go_at(fh, x, y): global stride seek(fh.fileno(),x*so_pixel + y *stride, 0) def next_line(fh, reminder): seek(fh.fileno(), stride - reminder, SEEK_CUR) def put_char(fh, x,y, letter): go_at(fh, x, y) black = encode(0,0,0,255) white = encode(255,255,255,255) char = font.get(letter, None) or font["void"] line = "" for col,pixel in enumerate(char): write(fh.fileno(), white if pixel else black) if (col%font["width"]==font["width"]-1): next_line(fh, so_pixel * font["width"]) COL=0 LIN=0 OUT = open("/dev/fb0", "bw") FD = OUT.fileno() def newline(): global OUT,LIN,COL LIN+=1 go_at(OUT, 0, LIN * font["height"]) def print_(line): global OUT, COL, LIN COL=0 for c in line: if c == "\n": newline() put_char(OUT,COL * font["width"] , LIN * font['height'], c) COL+=1 newline() for i in range(30): print_("hello lol")
Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Russ Allbery: California general election

Planet Debian - Sun, 2024-10-20 20:03

As usual with these every-two-year posts, probably of direct interest only to California residents. Maybe the more obscure things we're voting on will be a minor curiosity to people elsewhere. I'm a bit late this year, although not as late as last year, so a lot of people may have already voted, but I've been doing this for a while and wanted to keep it up.

This post will only be about the ballot propositions. I don't have anything useful to say about the candidates that isn't hyper-local. I doubt anyone who has read my posts will be surprised by which candidates I'm voting for.

As always with Calfornia ballot propositions, it's worth paying close attention to which propositions were put on the ballot by the legislature, usually because there's some state law requirement (often that I disagree with) that they be voted on by the public, and propositions that were put on the ballot by voter petition. The latter are often poorly written and have hidden problems. As a general rule of thumb, I tend to default to voting against propositions added by petition. This year, one can conveniently distinguish by number: the single-digit propositions were added by the legislature, and the two-digit ones were added by petition.

Proposition 2: YES. Issue $10 billion in bonds for public school infrastructure improvements. I generally vote in favor of spending measures like this unless they have some obvious problem. The opposition argument is a deranged rant against immigrants and government debt and fails to point out actual problems. The opposition argument also claims this will result in higher property taxes and, seriously, if only that were true. That would make me even more strongly in favor of it.

Proposition 3: YES. Enshrines the right to marriage without regard to sex or race into the California state constitution. This is already the law given US Supreme Court decisions, but fixing California state law is a long-overdue and obvious cleanup step. One of the quixotic things I would do if I were ever in government, which I will never be, would be to try to clean up the laws to make them match reality, repealing all of the dead clauses that were overturned by court decisions or are never enforced. I am in favor of all measures in this direction even when I don't agree with the direction of the change; here, as a bonus, I also strongly agree with the change.

Proposition 4: YES. Issue $10 billion in bonds for infrastructure improvements to mitigate climate risk. This is basically the same argument as Proposition 2. The one drawback of this measure is that it's kind of a mixed grab bag of stuff and probably some of it should be supported out of the general budget rather than bonds, but I consider this a minor problem. We definitely need to ramp up climate risk mitigation efforts.

Proposition 5: YES. Reduces the required super-majority to pass local bond measures for affordable housing from 67% to 55%. The fact that this requires a supermajority at all is absurd, California desperately needs to build more housing of any kind however we can, and publicly funded housing is an excellent idea.

Proposition 6: YES. Eliminates "involuntary servitude" (in other words, "temporary" slavery) as a legally permissible punishment for crimes in the state of California. I'm one of the people who think the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution shouldn't have an exception for punishment for crimes, so obviously I'm in favor of this. This is one very, very tiny step towards improving the absolutely atrocious prison conditions in the state.

Proposition 32: YES. Raises the minimum wage to $18 per hour from the current $16 per hour, over two years, and ties it to inflation. This is one of the rare petition-based propositions that I will vote in favor of because it's very straightforward, we clearly should be raising the minimum wage, and living in California is absurdly expensive because we refuse to build more housing (see Propositions 5 and 33). The opposition argument is the standard lie that a higher minimum wage will increase unemployment, which we know from numerous other natural experiments is simply not true.

Proposition 33: NO. Repeals Costa-Hawkins, which prohibits local municipalities from enacting rent control on properties built after 1995. This one is going to split the progressive vote rather badly, I suspect.

California has a housing crisis caused by not enough housing supply. It is not due to vacant housing, as much as some people would like you to believe that; the numbers just don't add up. There are way more people living here and wanting to live here than there is housing, so we need to build more housing.

Rent control serves a valuable social function of providing stability to people who already have housing, but it doesn't help, and can hurt, the project of meeting actual housing demand. Rent control alone creates a two-tier system where people who have housing are protected but people who don't have housing have an even harder time getting housing than they do today. It's therefore quite consistent with the general NIMBY playbook of trying to protect the people who already have housing by making life harder for the people who do not, while keeping the housing supply essentially static.

I am in favor of rent control in conjunction with real measures to increase the housing supply. I am therefore opposed to this proposition, which allows rent control without any effort to increase housing supply. I am quite certain that, if this passes, some municipalities will use it to make constructing new high-density housing incredibly difficult by requiring it all be rent-controlled low-income housing, thus cutting off the supply of multi-tenant market-rate housing entirely. This is already a common political goal in the part of California where I live. Local neighborhood groups advocate for exactly this routinely in local political fights.

Give me a mandate for new construction that breaks local zoning obstructionism, including new market-rate housing to maintain a healthy lifecycle of housing aging into affordable housing as wealthy people move into new market-rate housing, and I will gladly support rent control measures as part of that package. But rent control on its own just allocates winners and losers without addressing the underlying problem.

Proposition 34: NO. This is an excellent example of why I vote against petition propositions by default. This is a law designed to affect exactly one organization in the state of California: the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. The reason for this targeting is disputed; one side claims it's because of the AHF support for Proposition 33, and another side claims it's because AHF is a slumlord abusing California state funding. I have no idea which side of this is true. I also don't care, because I am fundamentally opposed to writing laws this way. Laws should establish general, fair principles that are broadly applicable, not be written with bizarrely specific conditions (health care providers that operate multifamily housing) that will only be met by a single organization. This kind of nonsense creates bad legal codes and the legal equivalent of technical debt. Just don't do this.

Proposition 35: YES. I am, reluctantly, voting in favor of this even though it is a petition proposition because it looks like a useful simplification and cleanup of state health care funding, makes an expiring tax permanent, and is supported by a very wide range of organizations that I generally trust to know what they're talking about. No opposition argument was filed, which I think is telling.

Proposition 36: NO. I am resigned to voting down attempts to start new "war on drugs" nonsense for the rest of my life because the people who believe in this crap will never, ever, ever stop. This one has bonus shoplifting fear-mongering attached, something that touches on nasty local politics that have included large retail chains manipulating crime report statistics to give the impression that shoplifting is up dramatically. It's yet another round of the truly horrific California "three strikes" criminal penalty obsession, which completely misunderstands both the causes of crime and the (almost nonexistent) effectiveness of harsh punishment as deterrence.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

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