Raymond P. Burkholder - Things I Do

Somewhere in the Globe and Mail:

All things being equal – such as revenue, number of employees – the value of a product company that owns intellectual property (IP) is four times that of a similar service company. Generally speaking, an investor will value a service-based company at one to two times its revenue, while product-based companies are valued at four to 10 times.

• 6-Digit NTP Synchronized Network Clock with IEEE 802.3af PoE - LED digital wall clocks that synchronize over an Ethernet network to an accurate time reference. [with a starting point of A Guide To GPS NTP Servers For Network Time Synchronization]
• GPS NTP Network Time Server (TM1000A) - The TimeMachines GPS NTP Network Time Server is a simple to use GPS based time server that supplies accurate time for all computers and time keeping devices on the network.
• Nothing to see, but something to read: Network Synchronization: Public NTP Servers vs. GPS NTP Servers

Or not see:

• LeoNTP Network Master Clock / Time Server is a Stratum 1 Master Clock / Time server with GPS synchronised clock source designed from the ground up with the sole purpose of providing a cost effective but highly accurate and extremely high performing networked time server.

From the Debian bugs mailing list here is an interesting result of using non-native code in emulation:

1) Install qemu-system-arm.

2) Unpack kernel .deb, locate vmlinuz-4.9.0-8-armmp.
Or search your just-built zImage.

3) Run qemu (no root required):

  qemu-system-arm -M virt -nographic -kernel vmlinuz-4.9.0-8-armmp

If you see a kernel panic - the outcome is positive, the kernel is OK.
If it just stays there eating 100% CPU - the outcome is negative.

The above is used to sus out some issues with the linux-image-4.9.0-8-armmp-lpae:armhf kernel on Banana PI and Lamobo R1, with the notes in Bug#922478. More talk of the bug on Hacker News.

The more you try to hide, the more attention you attract. -- Anon - the movie

Anonymizing one's self is difficult. Technology companies are coming up with surprising ways to bypass the cloak of 'leave me alone' we attempt to wrap around ourselves. From a news group, here is an interesting mechanism describing the continuing escalation:

The statement of purpose:

To augment what many already have said here - it's a tie between IP address and household address and name/surname that should not be public, the address itself is mostly harmless and it doesn't matter if it's static or dynamic. Tracing gets done on L7 and above anyway

The statement of bypass:

In the current state of the web, if a user gets a new address, the various web surveillance mechanisms will associate it with the previous user identity and context after maybe a dozen web queries or two. That gets better if the user has a strong defensive posture, blocks web trackers, etc. But it just takes one cookie, or one login, or some other inference, and poof, the surveillance databases know that new_address_X is the same user as old_address_Y.

The case of the household is even worse. It takes only one cookie, login, etc, and the surveillance databases will learn that new_prefix_P is the same household as old_prefix_Q. Even you run Ghostery or Privacy Badger or the latest release of Firefox, you won't escape if you share a prefix with someone in your household who doesn't. Or with one of those surveillance devices that masquerade as thermostats or light switches or voice assistants.

So that's pretty bleak. If you want defense, you probably want to allocate different /64 prefixes to different devices, and change them really often. You may not need to change them for every devices -- no point providing privacy to the surveillance thermostat. But for your laptop, your tablet or your phone, they to change before the surveillance advertisers see you access a dozen web pages or two.

-- Christian Huitema

To help the discussion of how matching identifying information can be quite easy, take the following tests with your browser:

• Am I Unique - Learn how identifiable you are on the Internet
• Panopticlick - is your browser safe against tracking?

Background info on browser fingerprinting and tracking:

• What Is It and What Should You Do About It?
• Why you see online ads for stuff you buy in the real world

To finish things off, another quote from Anon - the movie:

It is not that I have something to hide, it is that I have nothing I want you to see

Building from Android Source Code -- Android Open Source Project

The repo init command doesn't like some forms of NAT. A command like:

$ repo init  --depth 1 --no-clone-bundle  -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest

may stick at the following with 100% cpu:

 * [new tag]         v1.9.5     -> v1.9.5
 * [new tag]         v1.9.6     -> v1.9.6
Get https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest

When performing a debug, this is the stage where it is stuck (no idea how to fix it, ended up bypassing NAT):

$ repo --trace init  --depth 1 --no-clone-bundle  -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest
Geta https://gerrit.googlesource.com/git-repo
remote: Counting objects: 142, done
remote: Total 4158 (delta 2038), reused 4158 (delta 2038)
Receiving objects: 100% (4158/4158), 4.69 MiB | 519.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (2038/2038), done.
From https://gerrit.googlesource.com/git-repo
 * [new branch]      maint      -> origin/maint
 * [new branch]      master     -> origin/master
 * [new branch]      stable     -> origin/stable
 * [new tag]         v1.0       -> v1.0
 * [new tag]         v1.0.1     -> v1.0.1
 * [new tag]         v1.0.2     -> v1.0.2
 * [new tag]         v1.0.3     -> v1.0.3
...
 * [new tag]         v1.8.2     -> v1.8.2
 * [new tag]         v1.9.0     -> v1.9.0
 * [new tag]         v1.9.1     -> v1.9.1
 * [new tag]         v1.9.2     -> v1.9.2
 * [new tag]         v1.9.3     -> v1.9.3
 * [new tag]         v1.9.4     -> v1.9.4
 * [new tag]         v1.9.5     -> v1.9.5
 * [new tag]         v1.9.6     -> v1.9.6
: git --version 1>| 2>|
: parsing /home/rpb/.gitconfig
Get https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest
: export GIT_DIR=/home/rpb/aosp/.repo/manifests.git
: git init 1>| 2>|
: git config --file /home/rpb/aosp/.repo/manifests.git/config --null --list 1>| 2>|
: git config --file /home/rpb/aosp/.repo/manifests.git/config --replace-all filter.lfs.smudge git-lfs smudge --skip -- %f 1>| 2>|
: git config --file /home/rpb/aosp/.repo/manifests.git/config --unset-all core.bare 1>| 2>|
: git config --file /home/rpb/aosp/.repo/manifests.git/config --replace-all remote.origin.url https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest 1>| 2>|
: git config --file /home/rpb/aosp/.repo/manifests.git/config --replace-all remote.origin.fetch +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* 1>| 2>|
: git fetch --progress origin --tags +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* +refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master 1>| 2>|
^Caborted by user

A few different sync command styles from AOSP repo sync takes too long:

$ repo sync  -f --force-sync --no-clone-bundle --no-tags -j$(nproc --all)
$ repo sync -c --no-tags --no-clone-bundle -j2
$ repo sync -c --no-clone-bundle

where -j2 is number of parallel processes to use, the other parameters require some description.

Android for Enterprise

• Android for enterprise in Platform Developers
• Build for Enterprise - overview
• Enterprise - Device Administration
• Android Enterprise Recommended
• Android Enterprise devices and service providers
• DevicePolicyManager - in developers

Quotes Archive

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. — Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger in The Elements of Programming Style.

The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing -- Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed application, makes the following eight assumptions. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences. — Peter Deutsch

• The network is reliable
• Latency is zero
• Bandwidth is infinite
• The network is secure
• Topology doesn’t change
• There is one administrator
• Transport cost is zero
• The network is homogeneous

There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.