Antranig Vartanian

March 26, 2023

Couple of years ago, I saw an article that said “By the year 20XX 70% of all created content will be video”. Unfortunately, I didn’t bookmark the article, so I can’t link it.

But I did not believe that. More importantly, I did not want to believe that, and for a long time, I thought that it was wrong.

But couple of weeks ago, while sitting next to my girlfriend, I watched her scroll in Instagram, and oh my god, that article was very much accurate. Everything was a video.

This is specifically sad, because Instagram was a photo sharing platform and now most of the content there is indeed video.

After weeks of researching, looks like that most things ARE video these days.

I have mixed feelings about this.

I wonder if there are any non-Instagram, non-TikTok, actually a real world wide web, video blogs. We’ve seen web logs, we’ve seen photo blogs, but video blogs wold be very interesting. Maintaining them too!

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Design Guidelines vs Pushing The Limits

One of the design guidelines of Jailer is don’t break FreeBSD. As in if someone installed and used Jailer, and then deleted the Jailer binary and libraries, their Jails would still run without any issues. We do this with minimal intervention, for example, jailer init patches FreeBSD’s /etc/rc.d/jail, but in a way that you wouldn’t feel the difference much. We don’t create new rc.conf variables, we just change couple of loops. In a way, you can keep these changes even if you delete Jailer so your system would be much improved. Obviously, we do sent these patches to FreeBSD src.

But I’m in front of an issue right now. On one side, I want to keep these guidelines, on the other, pushing the limit will allow me to improve Jailer way more than I expected.

These are the things that I think about before sleep, or during the shower. I gave a promise, that I will not break the Jail ecosystem. But what if, just what if, the ecosystem was broken in the first place?

Some of you might know, that we’ve been working on integrating libucl with Jail. The experiments have been going well, in such that I feel I want to integrate these experiments with Jailer already, even before they get into FreeBSD (and they might even not get in at all).

My dream of Jailer and its ecosystem is complex. I feel that these integration would do good on the long-term, but I want to keep the short term alive as well.

One idea is to fork Jailer, keep two versions of it. One version that’s FreeBSD compliant, and another one that is pushing the limits.

This is going to be an interesting week…

That’s all folks…

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Link

WordPress.com owner Automattic acquires an ActivityPub plugin so blogs can join the Fediverse

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr and other web publishing tools, is the new owner of the ActivityPub for WordPress plugin and has also recruited its developer to come work for the company, according to Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg.

This makes me very happy! I’ve been using that plugin for a while now. As a matter of fact, that plugin was the main reason why I moved to WordPress.

The newly acquired plugin allows WordPress.org and WordPress.com blog owners to reach readers on federated platforms, like the Twitter rival Mastodon and others.

I absolutely hate that people are calling Mastodon a rival of Twitter. Mastodon (and the decentralized web) is not a rival to anything. It’s like saying that Coca-Cola’s rival is… water. Nope, Coca-Cola’s rival is Pepsi, Twitter’s rival is <insert a corporate and centralized social media here>, but not ActivityPub based networks.

The Internet is going back to its roots, and I am loving it!

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Antranig Vartanian

March 14, 2023

It took me a while to realize this, but if you’re also working from home, these two tips might help you be more productive.

  1. When you start your work, make sure you’re dressed.
  2. Get a static working desk.

It seems so simple and rudimentary, right? It took me 6 months to realize this! Working from a desk fully clothed is a lot better than working in underwear in bed.

But I guess everyone is different. For me, this has been a huge productivity change 🙂

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Antranig Vartanian

March 7, 2023

You’d think that macOS would have a Mission Control shortcut that does “Switch to last used Desktop”, but no, it does not. And this makes macOS very hard to use for people like me, who have 10 Desktops.

Screenshot 2023 03 07 at 2 50 52 PM

On the other hand, WindowMaker, the window manager that “reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NeXTSTEP user interface”, which macOS also was based on, had that shortcut for almost exactly 10 years.

Screenshot 2023 03 07 at 2 50 12 PM

Someone PLEASE add this simple and powerful feature.

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Call For Testing: Jailer v0.1.1

Well, it’s finally here! After a week of sleepless work, I cleaned up the Jailer codebase and added many features (and removed some as well!) that I wanted since last year 🙂

If you are reading this, please consider testing Jailer on FreeBSD. The codebase is at illuria/jailer.

The README.md should have all the info that you need to run Jailer.

If find any issues, please report to illuria/jailer/issues or you can email me personally at antranigv [at] freebsd [dot] am

Here’s the roadmap for what’s coming next

  1. Complete NetGraph support using jng.
  2. Jailerfile, which will be something similar to Dockerfile, allowing developers to create consistent images.
  3. jailerd and jailerctl, for remote jailer automation. This will be an open-source port of what illuria has already developed.
  4. Distributed Jailer, where jailerctl list will show not just what’s on a remote machine, but on a remote datacenter, inspired by Triton. Again, we have this at illuria, but we need to create an open-source port.

This release is dedicated to

Thank you for reading 🙂

That’s all folks…

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Antranig Vartanian

March 3, 2023

I’ve been working very intensively with Jailer the last couple of days.

The first thing I added, which I personally needed it is a dry run, where Jailer says what it would do. Here’s an example.

Screenshot 2023 03 02 at 8 48 08 PM

by adding -D Jailer would display what it would do, including post the jail.conf file, ZFS commands and any network setup commands.

A while back kfv has made a jailer init

subcommand that initializes the system. Things like rc.conf variables, ZFS datasets and applying our own patches. I just added some coloring and confirmation to that!

Screenshot 2023 03 03 at 3 27 35 PM

I think I will be making an official Jailer v0.1.0 release in the coming days!

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Unshallow Git

A while back, when I was working on some changes for FreeBSD, I wanted to checkout our source tree. A very typical thing that every developer does every day, that is

git clone https://git.FreeBSD.org/src.git

However, the FreeBSD git server is pretty far from me. There’s a GeoDNS system in the front so I usually hit the one in Frankfurt, Germany.

Still, it’s pretty slow!

root@devbsd14:~ # git clone https://git.FreeBSD.org/src.git
Cloning into 'src'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 4234853, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (381211/381211), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (28321/28321), done.
Receiving objects:   3% (152416/4234853), 48.97 MiB | 1.08 MiB/s

Okay, 1.08 MiB/s is not that bad, but I’m sure we can do better.

How about GitHub?

root@devbsd14:~ # git clone https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/
Cloning into 'freebsd-src'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 4793378, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (398/398), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (233/233), done.
Receiving objects:  16% (780550/4793378), 223.95 MiB | 2.13 MiB/s

Okay, 2.13 MiB/s is also not bad, but I have a faster connection than that!

Regardless, I needed just the last state of the code, without the history, so in order to save time and bandwidth I can do

git clone --depth 1 https://git.FreeBSD.org/src.git

And now I can work.

The problem is that this was months ago, and I totally forgot about it.

While I was debugging some issue, I ran git blame and I realized that I can’t see anything older than 3 months. what?

Lucky me, I was able to understand what I did by looking into the shell history.

Okay, so two questions.

  1. Can I get the rest of the depth/history?
  2. If GitHub and git.FreeBSD.org is slow, can I setup a local mirror?

Turns out, I had to ask these questions in reverse.

First, I setup a FreeBSD source tree mirror in my home server (which also serves this blog). The connection to that server is fast, the download speed is around 500Mbps, compared to the 50Mbps that I get in this apartment. Yes, I have to apartments, but one of them is only for servers 😀

That was pretty easy to do, I just needed to tell Gitea to mirror https://git.FreeBSD.org/src.git, and in couple of minutes, it was all ready.

Next, I had to make my local checkout… unshallow. After setting up the appropriate remotes, all I had to do was

git pull --unshallow mirror main

and now I have the history all the way back to Jun 12, 1993.

Oh, right! The clone speed test!

root@devbsd14:~ # git clone git@git.bsd.am:antranigv/freebsd-src.git
Cloning into 'freebsd-src'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 4235021, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (4235021/4235021), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (824757/824757), done.
Receiving objects:  18% (762304/4235021), 207.13 MiB | 3.53 MiB/s

Okay! now this does use a lot more speed!

Lessons Learned?

  1. Latency matters! If the distance between my two apartments is $2 worth of commute, while the FreeBSD server is $2000 worth of commute, then my apartments are also close to each other digitally.
  2. When you do anything non-standard with git (e.g. --depth=1) make sure to read the docs on how to undo that later.

That’s all folks…

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Reply from National Vulnerability Database Team regarding Legacy Data Feeds

Couple of days ago when I was assisting a customer, I recommended that they follow the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (a.k.a. NIST) Information Technology Laboratory’s Computer Security Division’s National Vulnerability Database’s (a.k.a. NVD a.k.a. that place that publishes the CVEs) data feeds. (Apologies for the bad intro)

So, these are RSS feeds that “contains the most recent CVE cyber vulnerabilities published within the NVD”

Unfortunately, I saw a notice at the top of the page, which got me really worried. It says

In September 2023, the NVD plans to retire all legacy data feeds while guiding any remaining data feed users to updated application-programming interfaces (APIs).

Usually, I’d panic and start ranting on my blog, but this is the NVD we’re talking about. They are a US government project that has been doing a lot of good and they are sponsored by the CISA, an agency that does many good things not just for US citizens, but citizens of our planet.

I started digging to understand what exactly is going to be retired and most importantly, why?

The NVD has made an amazing change timeline that has the following

The NVD plans to retire the RSS data feeds. The NVD plans to enable reCAPTCHA across all webpages and to retire webpages intended to support web scraping (e.g., Full Listings) before its APIs existed.

Okay, NOW I’m worried.

I’ll break this into two parts.

Why we need RSS feeds

You see, the internet relies on RSS, and I’m not just saying that because most of my audience uses RSS daily. The reason is much deeper than that.

As Dave Winer blogged a month ago

RSS is a thing like roadways and paths of rivers, they change very slowly. Think about qwerty keyboards. That’s what we’re talking about here. Agreements between products to interop. RSS is just like the gauge of rails, or always driving on one side of the street. A convention that makes progress possible. #

Scripting.com, Saturday, January 28, 2023

There are three products/protocols that I use daily, it’s Slack (for work), XMPP (for friends and family) and Telegram (for Armenian tech communities).

There are specific things that I should deliver for all these and that is messages, alerts, notices.

For my work, I should be able to get news if there’s a security issue on FreeBSD, because we use that. For friends and family I should deliver notices if there are any issues or upcoming maintenance to our servers. For my telegram communities I should update them if we’re having any new meetups, events, podcasts.

But, instead of writing a software that fetches, parses, analyzes and does something-something to these messages, I use RSS! FreeBSD has an RSS feed for Security Advisories. All I do in Slack is /feed subscribe https://www.freebsd.org/security/feed.xml and now, every time there an SA for FreeBSD, I get notified in Slack.

For friends and family? I have Huginn agent that parses RSS and send an XMPP message. For Armenian tech communities? I read a website’s RSS and a bot posts it in a group.

You get the idea.

RSS is all about “things working together”, there is no need to write a specific piece of for that specific thing.

And for years, I’ve relied on NVD’s RSS data feed to notify customers, tell them what to upgrade, if they need to upgrade and why to upgrade.

These RSS feeds are part of my professional life, a way for me, and people like me to know if we should be in panic mode or not.

So…

Okay, now what?

I believe in communication. I was very sure that my questions will be answered by the NVD, so I sent a message!

Greetings dear NVD team, NIST team and Computer Security Division,

While browsing your website, I have noticed the following change:

> In September 2023, the NVD plans to retire all legacy data feeds and the 1.0 APIs.

This became very disturbing, as many companies (including mine) rely on the data feed provided by NIST’s NVD.

I have two questions:
1) Is there *any* chance to keep the RSS feeds?
2) Is it okay if others (i.e. I) generate an RSS feed from your new API, if your final decision for q#1 is no?

[ . . . ]

If I may, that being said, I’m sure there’s a good reason, so my other question is:
What are/were the technical issues with RSS? Could it be bypassed or hacked around?

Thank you for all the work that you do, and thank in advance.

Kind regards,

I was right! They did answer all of my questions! I got a reply yesterday, here it is.

1) Is there *any* chance to keep the RSS feeds?

We have no plans to continue providing the RSS feeds located at
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/data-feeds#RSS
https://nvd.nist.gov/feeds/xml/cve/misc/nvd-rss.xml
https://nvd.nist.gov/feeds/xml/cve/misc/nvd-rss-analyzed.xml

Additionally, it is important to point out that per our announcement at https://nvd.nist.gov/general/news/change-timeline, the RSS feeds will be retired in March, not September. If you were not aware of these announcements we highly advice joining the NVD Google Group to stay better informed (https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/g/nvd-news).

2) Is it okay if others (i.e. I) generate an RSS feed from your new API, if your final decision for q#1 is no?

All NIST publications are available in the public domain. Organizations seeking to automate the retrieval of NVD data should use the NVD’s Application Programing Interfaces (APIs).
Services which utilize or access the NVD are asked to display the following notice prominently within the application: “This product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD.” You may use the NVD name to identify the source of the data. You may not use the NVD name, to imply endorsement of any product, service, or entity, not-for-profit, commercial or otherwise. For information on how to the cite the NVD, including the database’s Digital Object Identifier (DOI), please consult NIST’s Public Data Repository.

3) What are/were the technical issues with RSS? Could it be bypassed or hacked around?

The RSS feeds were considered to be overly simplistic and underutilized, they were determined in scope of retirement for these reasons as part of a larger effort to consolidate our output formats as we move towards the APIs. If you would like to submit a user story explaining the benefits and needs that the APIs currently do not meet we would pass that along to the development team for consideration in the future.

Okay. I agree! RSS is very simplistic, but that’s the point! it’s supposed to be simple. I mean, it’s simple enough that podcasts are RSS feeds.

And to be clear, I DID check the NVD’s new Vulnerabilities API, it’s awesome, it’s nice, it’s documented very well, kudos to the team, they did an amazing work, I’m sure it wasn’t easy. It has, for sure, more features than RSS could provide.

What to do about it?

I understand that the NVD is pushing the REST API, and I also understand why. But I really don’t want to write a “wrapper” for every service and technology that I use.

Here are my two questions.

  1. Will systems break because of this? Are you using these feeds? Do you rely on them for yourself or your organization?
  2. Will there be an interest by the InfoSec community to write a wrapper that generates a new RSS feed from NVDs new API?

Personally, if there’s an interest or not, I will be stopping everything I’m working on to create this NVD-to-RSS generator, as I very much rely on it. It will be open-source, obviously. What I should build is a drop-in replacement, where you change the feed URL, and everything works like before. (Well, I have to finish my other open-source commitments first, then I should work on this 😀 hopefully it wont take long.)

I would like to thank the NVD for keeping these feeds for all these years and congratulate them for their new APIs, I’m sure many good things will come out of these APIs.

And thank you for reading 🙂

That’s all folks…

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