puer robustus

My Google Summer of Code '25 at Debian

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve participated in this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program and have been working on the small (90h) “autopkgtests for the rsync package” project at Debian.

Writing my proposal

Before you can start writing a proposal, you need to select an organization you want to work with. Since many organizations participate in GSoC, I’ve used the following criteria to narrow things down for me:

Programming language familiarity: For me only Python (preferably) as well as shell and Go projects would have made sense. While learning another programming language is cool, I wouldn’t be as effective and helpful to the project as someone who is proficient in the language already.
Standing of the organization: Some of the organizations participating in GSoC are well-known for the outstanding quality of the software they produce. Debian is one of them, but so is e.g. the Django Foundation or PostgreSQL. And my thinking was that the higher the quality of the organization, the more there is to learn for me as a GSoC student.
Mentor interactions: Apart from the advantage you get from mentor feedback when writing your proposal (more on that further below), it is also helpful to gauge how responsive/helpful your potential mentor is during the application phase. This is important since you will be working together for a period of at least 2 months; if the mentor-student communication doesn’t work, the GSoC project is going to be difficult.
Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) communication platforms: I generally believe that FOSS projects should be built on FOSS infrastructure. I personally won’t run proprietary software when I want to contribute to FOSS in my spare time.
Be a user of the project: As Eric S. Raymond has pointed out in his seminal “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” 25 years ago

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.

Once I had some organizations in mind whose projects I’d be interested in working on, I started writing proposals for them. Turns out, I started writing my proposals way too late: In the end I only managed to hand in a single one … which is risky. Competition for the GSoC projects is fierce and the more quality (!) proposals you send out, the better your chances are at getting one. However, don’t write proposals for the sake of it: Reviewers get way too many AI slop proposals already and you will not do yourself a favor with a low-quality proposal. Take the time to read the instructions/ideas/problem descriptions the project mentors have provided and follow their guidelines. Don’t hesitate to reach out to project mentors: In my case, I’ve asked Samuel Henrique a few clarification questions whereby the following (email) discussion has helped me greatly in improving my proposal. Once I’ve finalized my proposal draft, I’ve sent it to Samuel for a review, which again led to some improvements to the final proposal which I’ve uploaded to the GSoC program webpage.

Community bonding period

Once you get the information that you’ve been accepted into the GSoC program (don’t take it personally if you don’t make it; this was my second attempt after not making the cut in 2024), get in touch with your prospective mentor ASAP. Agree upon a communication channel and some response times. Put yourself in the loop for project news and discussions whatever that means in the context of your organization: In Debian’s case this boiled down to subscribing to a bunch of mailing lists and IRC channels. Also make sure to setup a functioning development environment if you haven’t done so for writing the proposal already.

Payoneer setup

The by far most annoying part of GSoC for me. But since you don’t have a choice if you want to get the stipend, you will need to signup for an account at Payoneer.

In this iteration of GSoC all participants got a personalized link to open a Payoneer account. When I tried to open an account by following this link, I got an email after the registration and email verification that my account is being blocked because Payoneer deems the email adress I gave a temporary one. Well, the email in question is most certainly anything but temporary, so I tried to get in touch with the Payoneer support - and ended up in an LLM-infused kafkaesque support hell. Emails are answered by an LLM which for me meant utterly off-topic replies and no help whatsoever. The Payoneer website offers a real-time chat, but it is yet another instance of a bullshit-spewing LLM bot. When I at last tried to call them (the support lines are not listed on the Payoneer website but were provided by the GSoC program), I kid you not, I was being told that their platform is currently suffering from technical problems and was hung up on. Only thanks to the swift and helpful support of the GSoC administrators (who get priority support from Payoneer) I was able to setup a Payoneer account in the end.

Apart from showing no respect to customers, Payoneer is also ripping them off big time with fees (unless you get paid in USD). They charge you 2% for currency conversions to EUR on top of the FX spread they take. What worked for me to avoid all of those fees, was to open a USD account at Wise and have Payoneer transfer my GSoC stipend in USD to that account. Then I exchanged the USD to my local currency at Wise for significantly less than Payoneer would have charged me. Also make sure to close your Payoneer account after the end of GSoC to avoid their annual fee.

Project work

With all this prelude out of the way, I can finally get to the actual work I’ve been doing over the course of my GSoC project.

Background

The upstream rsync project generally sees little development. Nonetheless, they released version 3.4.0 including some CVE fixes earlier this year. Unfortunately, their changes broke the -H flag. Now, Debian package maintainers need to apply those security fixes to the package versions in the Debian repositories; and those are typically a bit older. Which usually means that the patches cannot be applied as is but will need some amendments by the Debian maintainers. For these cases it is helpful to have autopkgtests defined, which check the package’s functionality in an automated way upon every build.

The question then is, why should the tests not be written upstream such that regressions are caught in the development rather than the distribution process? There’s a lot to say on this question and it probably depends a lot on the package at hand, but for rsync the main benefits are twofold:

The upstream project mocks the ssh connection over which rsync is most typically used. Mocking is better than nothing but not the real thing. In addition to being a more realisitic test scenario for the typical rsync use case, involving an ssh server in the test would automatically extend the overall resilience of Debian packages as now new versions of the openssh-server package in Debian benefit from the test cases in the rsync reverse dependency.
The upstream rsync test framework is somewhat idiosyncratic and difficult to port to reimplementations of rsync. Given that the original rsync upstream sees little development, an extensive test suit further downstream can serve as a threshold for drop-in replacements for rsync.

Goal(s)

At the start of the project, the Debian rsync package was just running (a part of) the upstream tests as autopkgtests. The relevant snippet from the build log for the rsync_3.4.1+ds1-3 package reads:

114s ------------------------------------------------------------
114s ----- overall results:
114s 36 passed
114s 7 skipped

Samuel and I agreed that it would be a good first milestone to make the skipped tests run. Afterwards, I should write some rsync test cases for “local” calls, i.e. without an ssh connection, effectively using rsync as a more powerful cp. And once that was done, I should extend the tests such that they run over an active ssh connection.

With these milestones, I went to work.

Upstream tests

Running the seven skipped upstream tests turned out to be fairly straightforward:

Two upstream tests concern access control lists and extended filesystem attributes. For these tests to run they rely on functionality provided by the acl and xattr Debian packages. Adding those to the Build-Depends list in the debian/control file of the rsync Debian package repo made them run.
Four upstream tests required root privileges to run. The autopkgtest tool knows the needs-root restriction for that reason. However, Samuel and I agreed that the tests should not exclusively run with root privileges. So, instead of just adding the restiction to the existing autopkgtest test, we created a new one which has the needs-root restriction and runs the upstream-tests-as-root script - which is nothing else than a symlink to the existing upstream-tests script.

The commits to implement these changes can be found in this merge request.

The careful reader will have noticed that I only made 2 + 4 = 6 upstream test cases run out of 7: The leftover upstream test is checking the functionality of the --ctimes rsync option. In the context of Debian, the problem is that the Linux kernel doesn’t have a syscall to set the creation time of a file. As long as that is the case, this test will always be skipped for the Debian package.

Local tests

When it came to writing Debian specific test cases I started of a completely clean slate. Which is a blessing and a curse at the same time: You have full flexibility but also full responsibility.

There were a few things to consider at this point in time:

Which language to write the tests in?

The programming language I am most proficient in is Python. But testing a CLI tool in Python would have been weird: it would have meant that I’d have to make repeated subprocess calls to run rsync and then read from the filesystem to get the file statistics I want to check.

Samuel suggested I stick with shell scripts and make use of diffoscope - one of the main tools used and maintained by the Reproducible Builds project - to check whether the file contents and file metadata are as expected after rsync calls. Since I did not have good reasons to use bash, I’ve decided to write the scripts to be POSIX compliant.
How to avoid boilerplate? If one makes use of a testing framework, which one?

Writing the tests would involve quite a bit of boilerplate, mostly related to giving informative output on and during the test run, preparing the file structure we want to run rsync on, and cleaning the files up after the test has run. It would be very repetitive and in violation of DRY to have the code for this appear in every test. Good testing frameworks should provide convenience functions for these tasks. shunit2 comes with those functions, is packaged for Debian, and given that it is already being used in the curl project, I decided to go with it.
Do we use the same directory structure and files for every test or should every test have an individual setup?

The tradeoff in this question being test isolation vs. idiosyncratic code. If every test has its own setup, it takes a) more work to write the test and b) more work to understand the differences between tests. However, one can be sure that changes to the setup in one test will have no side effects on other tests. In my opinion, this guarantee was worth the additional effort in writing/reading the tests.

Having made these decisions, I simply started writing tests… and ran into issues very quickly.

`rsync` and subsecond mtime diffs

When testing the rsync --times option, I observed a weird phenomenon: If the source and destination file have modification times which differ only in the nanoseconds, an rsync --times call will not synchronize the modification times. More details about this behavior and examples can be found in the upstream issue I raised. In the Debian tests we had to occasionally work around this by setting the timestamps explicitly with touch -d.

`diffoscope` regression

In one test case, I was expecting a difference in the modification times but diffoscope would not report a diff. After a good amount of time spent on debugging the problem (my default, and usually correct, assumption is that something about my code is seriously broken if I run into issues like that), I was able to show that diffoscope only displayed this behavior in the version in the unstable suite, not on Debian stable (which I am running on my development machine).

Since everything pointed to a regression in the diffoscope project and with diffoscope being written in Python, a language I am familiar with, I wanted to spend some time investigating (and hopefully fixing) the problem.

Running git bisect on the diffoscope repo helped me in identifying the commit which introduced the regression: The commit contained an optimization via an early return for bit-by-bit identical files. Unfortunately, the early return also caused an explicitly requested metadata comparison (which could be different between the files) to be skipped.

With a nicely diagnosed issue like that, I was able to go to a local hackerspace event, where people work on FOSS together for an evening every month. In a group, we were able to first, write a test which showcases the broken behavior in the latest diffoscope version, and second, make a fix to the code such that the same test passes going forward. All details can be found in this merge request.

`shunit2` failures

At some point I had a few autopkgtests setup and passing, but adding a new one would throw me totally inexplicable errors. After trying to isolate the problem as much as possible, it turns out that shunit2 doesn’t play well together we the -e shell option. The project mentions this in the release notes for the 2.1.8 version¹, but in my opinion a constraint this severe should be featured much more prominently, e.g. in the README.

Tests over an ssh connection

The centrepiece of this project; everything else has in a way only been preparation for this.

Obviously, the goal was to reuse the previously written local tests in some way. Not only because lazy me would have less work to do this way, but also because of a reduced long-term maintenance burden of one rather than two test sets.

As it turns out, it is actually possible to accomplish that: The remote-tests script doesn’t do much apart from starting an ssh server on localhost and running the local-tests script with the REMOTE environment variable set.

The REMOTE environment variable changes the behavior of the local-tests script in such a way that it prepends "$REMOTE": to the destination of the rsync invocations. And given that we set REMOTE=rsync@localhost in the remote-tests script, local-tests copies the files to the exact same locations as before, just over ssh.

The implementational details for this can be found in this merge request.

proposed-updates

Most of my development work on the Debian rsync package took place during the Debian freeze as the release of Debian Trixie is just around the corner. This means that uploading by Debian Developers (DD) and Debian Maintainers (DM) to the unstable suite is discouraged as it makes migrating the packages to testing more difficult for the Debian release team. If DDs/DMs want to have the package version in unstable migrated to testing during the freeze they have to file an unblock request.

Samuel has done this twice (1, 2) for my work for Trixie but has asked me to file the proposed-updates request for current stable (i.e. Debian Bookworm) myself after I’ve backported my tests to bookworm.

Unfinished business

To run the upstream tests which check access control list and extended file system attributes functionality, I’ve added the acl and xattr packages to Build-Depends in debian/control. This, however, will only make the packages available at build time: If Debian users install the rsync package, the acl and xattr packages will not be installed alongside it. For that, the dependencies would have to be added to Depends or Suggests in debian/control. Depends is probably to strong of a relation since rsync clearly works well in practice without, but adding them to Suggests might be worthwhile. A decision on this would involve checking, what happens if rsync is called with the relevant options on a host machine which has those packages installed, but where the destination machine lacks them.

Apart from the issue described above, the 15 tests I managed to write are are a drop in the water in light of the infinitude of rsync options and their combinations. Most glaringly, not all options of the --archive option are covered separately (which would help indicating what code path of rsync broke in a regression). To increase the likelihood of catching regressions with the autopkgtests, the test coverage should be extended in the future.

Conclusion

Generally, I am happy with my contributions to Debian over the course of my small GSoC project: I’ve created an extensible, easy to understand, and working autopkgtest setup for the Debian rsync package. There are two things which bother me, however:

In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have gone with shunit2 as a testing framework. The fact that it behaves erratically with the -e flag is a serious drawback for a shell testing framework: You really don’t want a shell command to fail silently and the test to continue running.
As alluded to in the previous section, I’m not particularly proud of the number of tests I managed to write.

On the other hand, finding and fixing the regression in diffoscope - while derailing me from the GSoC project itself - might have a redeeming quality.

DebConf25

By sheer luck I happened to work on a GSoC project at Debian over a time period during which the annual Debian conference would take place close enough to my place of residence. Samuel pointed the opportunity to attend DebConf out to me during the community bonding period and since I could make time for the event in my schedule, I signed up.

DebConf was a great experience which - aside from gaining more knowledge about Debian development - allowed me to meet the actual people usually hidden behind email adresses and IRC nicks. I can wholeheartedly recommend attending a DebConf to every interested Debian user!

For those who have missed this year’s iteration of the conference, I can recommend the following recorded talks:

While not featuring as a keynote speaker (understandably so as the newcomer to Debian community that I am), I could still contribute a bit to the conference program.

GSoC project presentation

The Debian Outreach team has scheduled a session in which all GSoC and Outreachy students over the past year had the chance to present their work in a lightning talk.

The session has been recorded and is available online, just like my slides and the source for them.

Debian install workshop

Additionally, with so many Debian experts gathering in one place while KDE’s End of 10 campaign is ongoing, I felt it natural to organize a Debian install workhop. In hindsight I can say that I underestimated how much work it would be, especially for me who does not speak a word of French. But although the turnout of people who wanted us to install Linux on their machines was disappointingly low, it was still worth it: Not only because the material in the repo can be helpful to others planning install workshops but also because it was nice to meet a) the person behind the Debian installer images and b) the local Brest/Finistère Linux user group as well as the motivated and helpful people at Infini.

Credits

I want to thank the Open Source team at Google for organizing GSoC: The highly structured program with a one-to-one mentorship is a great avenue to start contributing to well established and at times intimidating FOSS projects. And as much as I disagree with Google’s surveillance capitalist business model, I have to give it to them that the company at least takes its responsibility for FOSS (somewhat) seriously - unlike many other businesses which rely on FOSS and choose to freeride of it.

Big thanks to the Debian community! I’ve experienced nothing but friendliness in my interactions with the community.

And lastly, the biggest thanks to my GSoC mentor Samuel Henrique. He has dealt patiently and competently with all my stupid newbie questions. His support enabled me to make - albeit small - contributions to Debian. It has been a pleasure to work with him during GSoC and I’m looking forward to working together with him in the future.

Obviously, I’ve only read them after experiencing the problem. ↩︎

Reviews and summaries revisited

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the beginning of July I have announced that I want to write reviews/summaries of books I read, movies I watch, and podcasts I listen to and publish them as blog posts. Judging by my posts since then, one could conclude that I managed to read a single (!) book in the mean time. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In addition to the thus far reviewed “A Psalm for the Wild-Built”, I’ve read “More is Different”, “2 B R 0 2 B”, “Hamlet”, “Absurdistan”, “Death and the Penguin”, “The Knight in the Panther’s Skin”, “Glory”, “Master and Margarita”¹, “How Not To Be Wrong”, “Getting Real”, and “Culture vs. Copyright” since the beginning of July. I’ve also started reading “Tao Te Ching”, “Best and Brightest” as well as “Thus spoke Zarathustra” but had to put them aside for various reasons.

However, I’ve never really taken the time to review or summarize the books after reading them. This was only partially due to not dedicating time to this: It was also caused by the fact that I fairly quickly considered the format of blog posts to be somewhat suboptimal for reviews: For one, I’ve come across reading lists on other peoples’ blogs (e.g. Molly White’s reading list or this one), some including reviews directly in the reading list, and found that to be the superior format for storing shareable information on read and to-be-read books. But since I’ve started building my (digital) zettelkasten in Emacs org-mode with the help of org-roam (more on that in a future blog post), I also wanted to be able to have my reading list (and entries therein) available as nodes in my zettelkasten because books are a major source of ideas and knowledge for me.

With all these requirements I’ve arrived at the following setup:

Have a reading.org file as part of my zettelkasten git repo. Managing entries therein with the org-books package. Turn the same book entries into nodes in the org-roam zettelkasten by adding an ID property to every entry using org-id-get-create.
Hard linking the reading.org file into my blog content directory.
gitignoring the reading.org file in the blog repo. Reason being that while hugo is capable of parsing org files, the org mode parser used by hugo is somewhat limited. I prefer the customizability of the org mode built-in HTML exporter. For example, the reading list on my blog is the result of running C-c C-e h h with following header in reading.org:
```
#+OPTIONS: H:3
#+OPTIONS: prop:("AUTHOR" "RATING" "SOURCE" "ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE" "READ_LANGUAGE")
#+OPTIONS: author:nil email:nil creator:nil timestamp:nil
#+OPTIONS: tex:t
```
The hereby generated HTML file is then checked in into my blog git repository.

Obviously, there are some downsides to this setup: Firstly, I introduce a dependency of my blog onto my zettelkasten. But I can live with that so as to avoid duplication of information. Secondly, the id properties in the org generated html are not consistent over runs, meaning that links to specific entries will not point there anymore after another HTML export (and that the git diffs for the generated html are pointlessly cluttered). To achieve stable ids, I have to specify a CUSTOM_ID property for every book entry I make. This is somewhat annoying manual labor, but maybe I will be able to adapt the org-books-add-book call in a way that it adds a CUSTOM_ID property automatically in the future (after having familiarized myself with Emacs Lisp sufficiently). And lastly, it will be harder for outsiders to spot when I’ve actually finished a new book - but I assume that information is not particularly interesting to anyone other than me.

Depending on my time and need, I might create a similar setup for movies, series and podcasts in the future.

I consider reading books which are part of the russian cultural canon to be bad taste while russia is waging an imperialist and colonial war against Ukraine in the name of historical russian “greatness”. Especially, if the author was historically always of the opinion that an idea of Ukrainian independence is a bad joke. I’ve voiced these concerns at the book club meeting for which I’ve read the (admittedly impressive) book. ↩︎

Book review: A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

title: A Psalm for the Wild-Built
author: Becky Chambers
publication year: 2021
my rating: 3.5/5

After finding an interest in solarpunk ideas recently, it wasn’t long before this short novel ended up on my reading list.

The book describes the journey of a young individual looking for purpose in a very cool solarpunk world. The novel choses not go to deeply into why and how humans have transformed their lifestyle to a solarpunk one, but instead focuses on the self-discovery of the protagonist - who is aided in their endeavor by an unlikely and unexpected companion: a conscious robot who “it"self wants to have an answer to the question of “What do humans need?”.

I can recommend this little book to anyone, actually. For a science fiction book it is very accessible and relatable, even cozy at times. I feel like its assessment of our current situation as a society in which

“the ecosystem as a whole needs its participants to act with restraint in order to avoid collapse, but the participants themselves have no inbuilt mechanism to encourage such behavior”

can speak to anyone - maybe especially those “who could use a break”.

Reviews and summaries

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Going forward I will write review/summary posts about movies I’ve watched, podcast episodes I’ve listened to and books or articles I’ve read¹. By formulating my thoughts in reviews, I hope to a) memorize more from the content and b) have a quick lookup option in case I forgot stuff after all. And if my reviews are helpful to others, I’ll be doubly happy.

So without further ado, here’s my first book review!

While I’ll try to review every book I’ve read, I will be more selective with other media types. ↩︎

Reading freely

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I like reading. And ever since I bought myself an ereader¹ after having to move with a lot of physical books one too many times, I have never regretted that purchase: It is light (and thus I can always have it with me), can hold thousands of books, allows me to read in the dark (as it has background light), has an integrated dictionary, and (given my reading habits) is also more environmentally friendly than buying paper books.

However, not all is well with the current ereading ecosystem.

There is no truly free ereader device (yet)

On the 4th of September 2021, I asked the Fediverse the following questions in my very first post:

I am looking for a privacy friendly, FOSS powered e-reader. AFAIK, there are no mainstream products which qualify. The only options I have found so far - which seem far from stable - are:

The Open Book Project

PineNote (which is in fact much more than an ereader)

Did I miss something? Does anyone have experiences with the devices mentioned above?

Unfortunately, I did not miss anything back then: There (still) is no truly free (i.e. runs exclusively with free software), production quality ereader in sight².

The Free Software Foundation (FSF)³ has identified the need for a freedom respecting ereader back in 2021 and LibrePlanet volunteers put together some information on what needs to be done to completely free an existing ereader. But for now we’re stuck with suboptimal solutions. Which is a real shame in my opinion, given the educational, cultural, historical, and political importance of being able to read and having access to knowledge.

Freeing your ereader a little bit

Despite the fact that there currently is no ereader device, which can be powered with free software alone, you can increase your degrees of freedom by installing a FOSS reader application on your device. Unlike the default reader applications on the Kindle or Kobo ereaders, which come with a lot of telemetry and other anti-features (e.g. lack of customization options, reduced set of supported ebook formats), the FOSS alternatives take your privacy seriously and are often more performant.

The most widely supported and feature-rich FOSS reader application is Koreader. For certain Kobo devices, Plato is a very good (and simpler) alternative.

To install either of the two reader applications, just follow the instructions in this forum thread - even the official Koreader installation documentation refers you there. In either case, the new reader application will not replace your factory reader app but rather be installed along side it. Feel free to experiment and see what works best for you!

Ebooks and their intricacies

Now to the final piece of the puzzle: the ebooks themselves. Because of the higher complexity of ebooks as compared to paper books (which are amazingly simple if you think about it), there are a few things to consider though.

Formats

Like so often with “standards”, there is a proliferation of ebook formats. If you can choose, stick with the ePub format which is a vendor independent, widely-supported (not by the default Kindle reader app - for obvious reasons) standard. While there have been changes to this format over time, I don’t agree with Brewster Kahle from the Internet Archive when he says that digital books wear out faster than physical ones as long as the format specifications remain open and somewhat concise (so that not only one entity can effectively implement the standard).

Library management

I’d recommend managing your ebooks from a computer, not the ereader itself. Often the ereader is tied to one specific ebook shop (more on that later) and you probably don’t backup your ereader’s storage. It also allows you to use your ereader without it ever connecting to the Internet, thereby stopping all telemetry in its tracks.

If you follow my advice, install Calibre. It is the Swiss Army knife of ebook management software: It stores and categorizes your ebooks, allows you to convert them from one format to another, exports them to external devices (i.e. ereaders), allows you to edit them and their metadata, and can also open them for reading. What functionality does not come out-of-the-box can be added via plugins. Calibre is free software and available for all major operating systems.

Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)

Digital Restrictions Management - euphemistically called Digital Rights Management by publishers - is an abomination. Independent of the medium it is applied to; even if I’ll focus on ebooks in this post.

I won’t go into the details on why DRM is so harmful in this blog post. If you’re really interested, have a look at the Defective By Design campaign, listen to the first episode of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE)⁴ podcast which features Cory Doctorow in a discussion on DRM, or watch Cory’s “Beyond unfree” talk at libreplanet 2017. In short: DRM uses cryptography to strip power and freedom away from you and instead gives it to third-parties. With DRM, you don’t own the digital goods you pay for, but much rather enter a service agreement in which you buy access to those digital goods - and that access can be cancelled anytime: When Microsoft stopped its ebook store (and the accompanying DRM servers), everyone who purchased books there could not read them anymore. Amazon had the audacity to remove copies of Orwell’s “1984” (of all books!) from Kindle users’ devices.

At least that is the case when we talk about hard DRM which is usually enforced by Adobe through Adobe Digital Editions (which is not even available for Linux based operating systems). What is sometimes referred to as social or soft DRM is not DRM in the strict sense: You actually own a digital copy of the book - it just has been modified to contain identifying information about the buyer to discourage sharing the ebook freely on the internet. Watermarking is a better name for this process and is totally fair in my opinion. This is not the harmful DRM making you dependent on the goodwill of third-parties.

Where to download ebooks?

There are a lot (!) of options on where to get ebooks. I can recommend the following sites for works whose copyright has expired, which are in the public domain, or are freely licensed:

The Gutenberg Project for the most complete collection of ebooks which are in the public domain in the US
Faded Page is the equivalent of the Gutenberg Project with respect to Canadian copyright law
Standard Ebooks to get uniformly and nicely typeset and proofread (US) public domain ebooks
Ebooks at the Internet Archive
dbooks.org for scientific and educational resources in the pdf format
Free Programming books list as maintained on Microsoft Github

For books which are still protected by copyright, you have to resort to online ebook stores. In practice, that also means that you cannot buy ebooks anonymously (because we still lack a viable way of paying privately online and/or because AFAIK one cannot buy ebooks in physical book stores with a flash drive for example). Personally, I can recommend these stores:

Beam Shop for guaranteed DRM-free German language ebooks.
yakaboo for ebooks in Ukrainian (or Russian). Unlike Beam, they don’t make an explicit commitment against DRM but I have yet to encounter a case where DRM was used.
HumbleBundle sells changing DRM-free ebook bundles.
The Pragmatic Bookshelf sells DRM-free ebooks on programming.

You can find more DRM-free ebook sources in the Defective By Design guide, but since I haven’t tried most of them I can’t make a personal recommendation.

Occassionally, you will find a DRM-free ebook in large ebook stores like Kobo, Barnes & Noble, ebook.de or Orell Füssli - feel free to buy those. Just be aware that the vast majority of books there is sold with DRM: DO NOT BUY THOSE⁵! Go read this wikipedia article instead ;)

In my case the Kobo Aura. It is still going strong after almost 10 years :) On a sidenote: If you want to use a Kobo device without a Kobo account (which was mandatory back when I bought my ereader), you can follow these instructions. ↩︎
There is the interesting Parabola-rM project which powers the reMarkable e-paper tablet exclusively with free software. While this is promising, this device is a tablet and more than “just” an ereader. ↩︎
While the Free Software Foundation has done (and is still doing) incredibly important work on the topics of software freedom, privacy, and digital rights, it is not able to unite and lead the Free Software movement anymore after reinstating Richard M. Stallman - who, for all his (at times foundational) contributions to the Free Software movement, is simply a bad leader as he is self-righteous and divisive. A complete overhaul of the FSF strategic focus and leadership notwithstanding, the organization is going to fade into oblivion. ↩︎
Not to be confused with the FSF. While having a somewhat similar focus, the FSFE is a completely independent organization which severed ties with the FSF over the reinstatement of Richard Stallman. ↩︎
Even if there are ways to remove DRM from ebooks. This process unfortunately involves using non-free software and might be illegal depending on your legislation. ↩︎

Setting up my Pinebook Pro

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I bought myself a Pinebook Pro in December¹. The current Pinebook Pro batches come shipped with a default Manjaro ARM plus KDE as a desktop environment installed on the laptop’s eMMC. Apart from some weird sound issues (for which workarounds are discussed in the same thread), the software works fairly smoothly. However, Manjaro is a somewhat problematic distribution. Additionally, it also is not lightweight enough for me for a lightly powered device like the Pinebook Pro. Thus, I spent some time adapting my new laptop to my needs.

Overriding the default bootloader

As it turns out, even booting another distribution from a microSD (which the Pinebook Pro is totally capable of), wasn’t as straightforward as I thought. By default, the boot order of the U-Boot installation on the Pinebook Pro is: SPI > eMMC > microSD. So even with a bootable OS image flashed to the microSD card, Manjaro on the eMMC would boot first.

The solution to that problem is usually opening the Pinebook Pro (which is super easy), and disabling the eMMC with a simple switch². In my case, that switch did not work. That was confusing but not particularly tragic as one can simply unplug the whole eMMC module from the board, boot from the microSD, and plug the eMMC back in later.

Now, I wasn’t keen on constantly opening up my Pinebook Pro every time I wanted to boot from a microSD card. Tow-Boot to the rescue: By flashing Tow-Boot to the SPI of the Pinebook Pro, I would now have the possibility to select the device to be booted from a boot menu.

Choosing an OS

I wasn’t sure which OS I’d want to run on the Pinebook Pro. I knew that I’d

require the Pinebook Pro to be an officially supported device (via custom or generic OS images; it’s an ARM board after all),
prefer smaller OS images over a larger ones,
prefer an out-of-the-box full disk encryption (even if I would settle for an encrypted home directory)
want to use the sway tiling window manager instead of a full blown desktop environment for two reasons: performance and the underwhelming touchpad of the Pinebook Pro.

These conditions basically left me with: Kali Linux, Armbian, DietPi, and postmarketOS. I’ve tried all of them from a microSD card and in the end decided to install postmarketOS to the eMMC: it’s small, officially supports the Pinebook Pro (even with a pre-built image with sway), comes with full disk encryption, and has a vibrant community.

Installing postmarketOS to the Pinebook Pro’s eMMC

First, I had to download the relevant Pinebook Pro postmarketOS installer image, verify the sha256 hash³, and unzip the compressed image.

The second step is to flash the uncompressed installer image to the microSD card:

dd if=<path/to/installer.img> of=/dev/<device name of the microSD card> bs=1M status=progress

Once the flashing process is done, insert the microSD card into the Pinebook Pro⁴, boot from the microSD with the help of Tow-Boot, and then simply follow the installer’s instructions. Please be aware that flashing to the eMMC will completely wipe the data currently on it.

Obviously, I still love my librebooted T400 running Trisquel. Given that one cannot run the Pinebook Pro with exclusively free software at this point in time, the T400 is gonna stay my main computing device for the foreseeable future. However, with a battery life of 30 minutes and a weight of solid 3 kg it is more akin to a mobile desktop than a laptop. ↩︎
Key component 24 on the internal layout of the Pinebook Pro. Please note that the layout picture was slightly outdated in comparison to the Pinebook Pro version I received. ↩︎
e.g. with sha256sum -c <path/to/sha256checksumfile.sha256> ↩︎
In case it isn’t yet. Obviously, you can prepare the microSD card from the pre-installed Manjaro on the Pinebook Pro itself. ↩︎

Working on my blog

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Over the Christmas break I have (yet again) overhauled this blog. I had reworked it earlier this year already, when I moved the blog from the www to the blog subdomain and changed from the hydeout to the minimal-mistakes Jekyll theme. However, I was not convinced of the result for various reasons.

While the minimal-mistakes theme came with a lot of functionality, it was simply too much. It strayed far from the minimalistic design which I was aiming for. The blog looked very different on mobile devices compared to desktops. Ironically, it felt overloaded either way.

Additionally, I was tired of Jekyll. It served me well but I never managed to get a good understanding of the tool itself. Many basic features like e.g. displaying when posts were last modified were completely missing from the static site generator as such. Jekyll extensions can add this functionality — but even those I needed to monkey-patch in one instance. In general, I had troubles understanding Ruby, its different versions and its gems: In particular, I was astonished to see that a clean build of my tiny blog took around 4 minutes because the gem installation took so long.

Of course, I could have invested more time into learning about these technologies and alleviate most of the issues, but I am time constrained and have to prioritize things. Familiarizing myself with Ruby would be the 100th item on my priority list; simply because I currently don’t see myself developing in Ruby anytime soon.

On the other hand, I’ve wanted to learn Go for more than a year now¹. Using hugo, a static site generator written in Go, for my blog just seemed more obvious then. The fact that hugo comes with more built-in functionality compared to Jekyll and is distributed by various GNU/Linux distros as one single standalone binary, makes maintaining the blog simpler:

No need for a ruby environment, gems and Gemfiles, and third-party extensions.
Often there is one hugoesk solution to the problem. And given the hugo’s popularity others have found it most likely already.

The last piece in the migration puzzle was a simple, yet across all devices visually appealing hugo theme: hugo-flex. It supports post tags and categories, allows custom css and JavaScript (I need that for MathJax), and automatically creates an RSS feed.

The only thing I missed from hugo-flex compared to the minimal-mistakes theme were the notice classes. With some minor tweaks, however, I managed to load a minimal-mistakes inspired scss such that the notice functionality is still available to me.

The only thing I find unfortunate about the second migration of my blog within a year, is that I broke the existing links to my posts — again: All posts are served under a different URL now and following the old links will throw 404 errors². However, it is a price I am willing to pay for the result I get now: a beautiful and functional blog setup which is a solid foundation for more posts in the future.

Haven’t even managed that yet. This simply emphasizes how unrealistic learning Ruby is for me at the moment. ↩︎
Apologies to everyone whose links I broke. No more migrations going forward. Pinky promise ;) ↩︎

On blockchain based crypto tokens

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: I do not hold any stake in any blockchain based crypto token.

With the recent downswing in blockchain based crypto token prices, the hype about them has luckily died down a bit. If their prices (will ever) start rising again, however, my suspicion is that media will once again devote attention to them and many malinformed bandwaggoning decisions will be made (again). This post is an attempt to illustrate some fundamental limitations of blockchain tokens and their overwhelmingly harmful nature to a non-technical audience.

Blockchains and blockchain tokens

Blockchains come in two flavors: permissioned and permissionless. They share the underlying data structures of blocks being chained together by one block always directly referencing the preceding block. The main difference is who is allowed to add new blocks: In permissioned blockchains a central authority defines who is able to add blocks - therefore, this type of blockchains is also called private. In contrast, permissionless (or public) blockchains allow anyone to add blocks to the chain.

Both blockchain types can be distributed over multiple computers (nodes) which contribute computing power to calculate the next block (i.e. the process of mining). In this case, both types of blockchains need to make sure that the distributed ledger (the chain of blocks) is identical across all nodes. This is not trivial, as theoretically each node can suggest its own block. One way to foster cooperation between nodes is incentivizing them to play by the same rules: e.g. by only rewarding those nodes which computed the block which actually becomes the next one in the shared blockchain.

However, that is not sufficient for complete cohesion between the nodes. Therefore, the blockchain needs to be able to resolve conflicting next block suggestions. In case of permissioned blockchains the available consensus mechanisms between nodes are computationally efficient. In case of permissionless blockchains the consensus mechanisms are more complicated: a randomized but biased election mechanism determines what the valid next block is.

Since the crypto tokens discussed in this post are exclusively based on permissionless blockchains - since the removal of centralized power is one of their main promises - we will focus on their consensus mechanism subsequently.

Given that any node on the network can provide suggestions for the next block, the consensus mechanism of permissionless blockchains has to defend the blockchain from a Sybil attack: an attacker who - unbeknownst to the network - controls a majority of the seemingly independent nodes in an attempt to manipulate the vote on the next block. This is usually achieved by making the cost associated with undertaking such an attack larger than the reward from sucessfully mounting it. In short, the participation as a node in a permissionless blockchain must be expensive.

Since running a node for a permissionless blockchain is expensive, the nodes need to be compensated for their contribution of computing power. As there is no central authority on permissionless blockchains which could singlehandedly decide, what kind of reward and how much of it each contributing node should receive for its efforts, the reward has to be intrinsic to the blockchain building mechanism: The solution is to distribute tokens rooted in the very same blockchain to the miners. This is the origin of every cryptocurrency.

It is important to understand that these generated tokens are not at the center of the blockchain technology: blockchains are a way to create tamperproof records - nothing more, nothing less. The crypto tokens are an artifact of building a permissionless blockchain.

Economics of mining

Having a look at the microeconomics of mining permissionless blockchains provides interesting insights into the crypto token markets.

The starting point is that miners are rewarded in crypto tokens for their contribution to the computation of the next blocks on the blockchain. To increase the amount of tokens which they are awarded for computing the next blocks, they have to increase the amount of computing power dedicated to the problem. Now, computation is a field where one can realize massive economies of scale: the dollar cost per computational unit decreases with more computational units. This is the underlying reason, for most cryptocurrencies being mined by only a handful of mining pools:

“Bitcoin mining capacity is highly concentrated and has been for the last five years. The top 10% of miners control 90% and just 0.1% (about 50 miners) control close to 50% of mining capacity.” - Makarov & Scholar

The economic realities of permissionless blockchain computing already cast doubts on the decentralisation promises of blockchains (more on that later)!

Now, the big miners managed to increase their payouts in tokens by scaling up their investments in computational resources. Their operative costs and capital expenditures, however, are usually expressed in terms of fiat currency. Therefore, an exchange between cryptocurrency and fiat has to exist (or come into existence when credit lines run out). For the miners to churn out a profit, the following relationship has to hold:

$$ p_t \times n_t \gt c_c + c_o $$

Given that for each individual miner there are fairly inflexible constraints on the number of tokens mined $n_t$ as well as the capital costs $c_c$ and operational costs $c_o$ incurred, the price of the token $p_t$ is the driving variable for every miner’s bottom line. This fact creates perverse incentives to keep the price as high as possible. No means are off limits: The spectrum starts at creating a social media hype and ends with market manipulations.

On the value of blockchain tokens

Miners need to sell (some of) their tokens to cover their expenses. Now, why would anyone be on the buy side of a cryptocurrency to fiat exchange?

The only two reasons for why someone would buy a crypto token are:

A useful application of the crypto token (in which case it would be an investment).
The belief that the future exchange rate at $t_1$ can be expected to be higher than now because another buyer will expect an even higher exchange rate at $t_2$ (in which case it would be purely speculative).

Can a blockchain host a useful application?

Theoretically, yes. A blockchain is a valid way of creating tamperproof historical records.

In reality, there are two problems, however:

In cases where the task at hand is indeed the creation of a tamperproof historical record there are superior technological solutions which do not involve a blockchain¹.
In cases where the main goal is the application of the blockchain based token as a facilitator of some kind of transaction, the underlying blockchain technology - again, it is a tool to prevent the manipulation of records - is completely abused.

Since I am concerned with crypto tokens in this post, we’re clearly in problem field 2: as evidenced by the fact that noone is interested in the actual transaction records on the blockchain!

Therefore, the real problem crypto miners and crypto enthusiasts have to solve, is that it is not the blockchain they want to find a use for, but rather a use case for the blockchain artifacts.

Can blockchain tokens have a useful application?

Theoretically, yes. Practically, no.

While human society is great at engineering shared illusions (e.g. money², body corporate, nations, religion), these ideas have to be useful to come to bear. Given that crypto token proponents have had more than a decade³ to find a convincing application for their tokens but failed to do so up until now does not bode well for the future.

To some extent I understand their plight: their task is an incredibly difficult one. Since the tokens are bound to a blockchain - whose goal is to create unchangeable records, not to be fast or scalable - making these tokens useful becomes very difficult. In addition to that, these tokens have to be better than what we currently have in place in whatever they try to accomplish.

Various crypto token application suggestions have been made. We discuss some of the most prominent ones here.

Payment tokens

Due to the constraints imposed by the underlying blockchain technology these tokens cannot serve as a currency in the sense of being a transactional medium. They are simply too slow and expensive. It is very telling that attempts to alleviate this problem (e.g. by the Bitcoin Lightning Network) actually leave (!) the realm of the blockchain to facilitate payments. Naturally, the question arises why do we need a token constrained by a blockchain in the first place when we could simply use one which is also limited but not based on a blockchain?

Store of value

Another argument brought forth by crypto proponents is that due to many crypto tokens’ cap on issuance, the tokens can function as a store of value and protect from inflation. With the extraordinarily high observed volatility of crypto tokens, that is a tough argument to make. Even if the wild price swings were absent in crypto token markets, a store of value requires a whole bunch of people to share the illusion of it being a store of value. And then there is already at least one asset which is widely believed to store value: gold. How are crypto tokens better as a store of value than a metal which has technological applications and has for centuries served humans as a status symbol?

Smart contracts

Another attempt to offer added value in comparison to currently used payment systems is to allow for automated transactions on the blockchain in so called smart contracts - programs which trigger the exchange of crypto tokens under certain conditions without the involvement of a human being.

This sounds appealing until one realizes that a smart contract is code written by a falliable human. Who double checks this code? Is it feasible to double check every single smart contract one enters for bugs? What happens if an erroneuos transaction is triggered and permanently written to the underlying blockchain?

And even here the underlying blockchain imposes its limits: computational “power” and storage on the Ethereum blockchain is prohibitively expensive. If credit card fees seem excessive, blockchain fees are modern day robber baronry.

NFTs

Effectively, non-fungible tokens are http(s) links saved on a blockchain. That’s it. Think about it, links in an unalterable data structure pointing to some web server sold for millions of dollars!

How someone was willing to pay 410 ETH (which translates to slightly more than 1 million USD at then current prices) on 05.05.2022 for having a record saying that one paid⁴ 410 ETH for a link to the PNG file above is completely beyond me. At least I can find solace in embedding the picture underlying the NFT here⁵, thus making this my first million dollar blog post.

In addition to being completely dumbfounded by what is going on here, I am also aware of the huge technological attack surface: from the Ethereum blockchain, to the OpenSea exchange, the domain name where the NFT points, the web server hosting the actual image, or the clients displaying the NFTs. If anything in that chain is attacked successfully, the above 1 million USD can turn into a crap smiley in an instant.

“web3”

The current web (“web2”) is for a very large part dominated by a few companies who generate massive cashflows from providing services modern society relies on. Compared to the early web (“web1”) which was a network of independent nodes, the modern internet with its walled gardens (aka platforms) is significantly more centralized.

Crypto enthusiasts like to picture a blockchain powered “web3” as a viable alternative: the functionalities of the current web but distributed because it is based on a blockchain.

Moxie Marlinspike, the lead developer of the cryptography protocol which encrypts billions of messages every day, deals with these claims in his blog post on “web3”. A summary of his arguments:

Distributed apps are normal websites with the only difference that the state of the website does not live in a central database but on the distributed blockchain.
Now, the blockchain only really lives on various servers: desktop and mobile devices interacting with the distibuted app do not hold a copy of the blockchain.
Instead, end clients use services to parse the information on the blockchain for their requests.
Economic logic will inevitably lead to a few or a single dominant API service(s). Decentralisation is nowhere to be seen.

While there are efforts at decentralizing the web and the technologies powering it (e.g. the ActivityPub or Matrix protocol), they have absolutely nothing to do with blockchain or crypto tokens. The latter will do nothing to solve the problem - at most they will change who makes money on the web.

Fairytale promises: Decentralisation and distributed trust

Crypto enthusiasts promise decentralisation and distributed trust wherever they go. They portray crypto tokens and blockchain as the solution to power imbalances and the elimination of untrusted actors like commercial banks, central banks or governments.

On a practical level, they fall short of their promises for two reasons: First, all their infrastructure builds on the infrastructure they try to replace: They need fiat currencies. They need banks. They need reliable jurisdiction. They need the web infrastructure. Everything they build is layered on top of what we currently have. Suddenly one has to trust more parties, rather than less. Second, the economic realities of the web and blockchain mining will always push the ecosystem (mining pools, crypto exchanges, NFT platforms, wallet apps, etc.) in the direction of a centralized system with powerful intermediaries.

On a more fundamental, theoretical level, the promises of decentralisation and distributed trust will never materialize either. Because even in the ultimate vision of crypto enthusiasts trust is not eliminated, but shifted: Instead of trusting the US dollar, one would have to trust in the Bitcoin and its ecosystem. Instead of trusting one’s bank, one would have to trust one’s wallet app or exchange. Instead of trusting jurisdiction, one would have to trust the code powering the blockchain platform and the smart contracts.

As a software engineer, I wholeheartedly agree with the following xkcd comic:

You should not blindly trust software developers!
Blockchain is not a solution to most problems. If the buzzword is used to sell you stuff, run!

The second point alludes to what the whole crypto “asset” movement is all about in my opinion: Making money off of (gullible) speculators by feeding them promises of revolutionary innovation involving decentralisation and distributed trust which will never materialize after no convincing real life use case for the crypto token was to be found.

Negative externalities

In addition to not having any material use cases or applications, blockchains, blockchain tokens, and blockchain miners have significant negative externalities: they incinerate the planet, facilitate criminal activities, damage legitimate businesses, and drive up computing cost for regular end consumers.

The climate as collateral damage

The most common consensus algorithm used by blockchains is called Proof of Work. It basically requires nodes to solve computationally intensive math problems as fast as possible to be rewarded. To be clear: These math problems are of a purely theoretical nature. They do not calculate weather models or do scientific computations. Instead, it is a normed number crunching task. Since running a node in a permissionless blockchain has to be expensive to prevent a Sybil attack (refer to the section on blockchain mechanics) while individual miners have the incentive to constantly increase their computing power to increase profits from economies of scale (as described in the section on the economics of mining), the difficulty of the math problem at hand is constantly increased. This leads to ever more scarce resources being directed at ever more useless computations. The arms race between miners and the constant increase of the computational intensity leads directly to the consumption of humongous amounts of energy (according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index the estimated annual energy consumption of the Bitcoin blockchain amounts to 153.67TWh - that is approx. as much as Poland, a country of 40 million, consumes per year).

In addition to that, the electronic equipment used to carry out those computations has an estimated average lifetime of just 16 months⁶. Again, for solely the Bitcoin blockchain, this translates to an estimated annual e-waste amount of 30.7 kilotons in 2021. This is equivalent to the annual small IT equipment waste of a country like the Netherlands.

Faced with this criticism, crypto proponents usually either defend the high energy consumption (and e-waste generation) of the Proof of Work consensus mechanism or promise switching blockchains to alternative, less energy-intensive, consensus mechanisms.

But even if the energy required for the computations necessary for Proof of Work blockchains to work was fully sourced from renewable energy sources 100%, we’re still left with the energy used for producing the e-waste. Let’s assume these computation devices are also produced exclusively with renewable energy. Then the question becomes a matter or priorization: Do we, as humanity, have enough renewable energy available globally to allow ourselves to channel this amount of energy into the pointless computation of SHA256 hashes?

Commonly floated consensus mechanisms to replace Proof of Work are Proof of Space and Time and Proof of Stake: Proof of Space and Time uses storage space instead of computational power as a metric to keep the costs of a Sybil attack high. While this approach theoretically solves the energy consumption problem, it exacerbates the e-waste issue. A real-life attempt of a blockchain based on this principle failed spectacularly: the capital tied up in the hardware running the blockchain nodes surpassed the market cap of the associated crypto token. Proof of Stake is flawed in an even more serious way: Because those blockchain participants who have the most coins to stake, will end up having the most influence on what the next blocks of the blockchain are gonna be. The algorithm basically boils down to “power to the powerful”.

Criminal activities powered by crypto tokens

Given their high costs and lack of acceptance in exchange for goods and services, non-speculative transactions of crypto tokens are in the minority already. Of the transactions with a real world background, some are legit, some are criminal. While the exact proportions are unknown to me, the point here is that a lot of criminal activities could expand with the help of crypto tokens: Basically all ransomware attacks these days make the ransom demands in cryptocurrencies. Drug dealers sell drugs online in exchange for cryptocurrencies. Same goes for illicit weapons trade. While none of these criminal activities would cease to exist without cryptocurrencies, their scale would be significantly smaller because of the logistical difficulties involved.

Conclusion

What gives?

We have established that blockchains create tamperproof records. Public/permissionless blockchains reward their “miners” with blockchain based tokens for their computing power. The miners’ bottom line is first and foremost determined by the price of the token - and they need to exchange it to cover their fiat currency costs.

Despite being around for more than a decade, crypto tokens have not seen any useful application. The underlying (abused) technology severely limits their potential use cases going forward. In addition to lacking a single convincing use case, they come with an outrageous environmental footprint.

However, crypto proponents (whose bottom line depends on the perceived value of the token) promise decentralisation and distribution of trust away from powerful institutions like banks, central banks, and governments. Upon closer inspection it becomes clear, that these promises cannot possibly be fulfilled.

How come crypto “assets”’ market capitalization is in the billions of US dollars then? Well, why was one tulip bulb worth five times the average house price in the 17th century Netherlands? Put simply, there is money to be made in speculation! Miners, exchanges, and whichever business or “investor” has exposure to crypto “assets” has a vested interest in creating a hype for crypto tokens and creating the illusion of them being valuable. And as long as they find buyers around who think they can sell their crypto “assets” at a higher price later on, the market will continue to assign the crypto “assets” a non-zero price tag. Despite the fact that they are economically useless.

Nicolas Weaver, a computer science researcher at Berkeley, gives the IMHO only possible prudent advice to anybody considering to get involved with blockchain tokens in a 2019 talk with the title “Cryptocurrency: Burn it with Fire”:

In conclusion, it is a dismal space. Private and permissioned blockchains are an old idea - a good idea - just with a new buzzword on it. The public blockchains are grossly inefficient. The cryptocurrencies don’t work for buying anything [except] drugs and [paying] ransoms and stuff like that. Smart contracts are an unmitigated disaster unless you like comedy gold. And the field is just recapitulating 500 years of failures. So in the end, the only winning move is not to play - unless you like playing with flamethrowers.

Additional sources

In addition to the sources linked directly in the blog post, I can recommend having a look at

David Rosenthal’s talk at the RRI/Vanguard conference in winter 2021 and an extension of it at a lecture at Stanford University. For a much more in-depth analysis of non Proof-of-Work consensus mechanisms, refer to his dedicated blog post.
Molly White’s Web3 Is Going Great project which provides “some examples of how things in the blockchains/crypto/web3 technology space aren’t actually going as well as its proponents might like you to believe”.
Werwolf’s blog post on blockchains, NFTs, and “web3”.
rich collection of resources on crypto/web3
part of why Mozilla stopped accepting cryptocurrency donations
Crypto is the ‘commoditisation of populist anger, gambling and crime’
European Central Bank’s damning critique of Bitcoin and explanation why caveat emptor does not apply to crypto. In a speech in June 2023 Fabio Panetta, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, exposed the crypto industry for what it is: a “deleterious” form of finance “riddled with market failures and negative externalities” used for gambling and bypassing regulation.
Ex-AWS engineer describing AWS’ vain search for use cases of the blockchain technology
Drew DeVault’s unfinished but extensive slide deck on cryptocurrencies
Jorge Stolfi’s “Bitcoin is a Ponzi” and “Yes, bitcoin is a Ponzi” explainers
An anatomy of bitcoin price manipulation

“There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.” - Kai Stinchcombe ↩︎
Central banks go to great lengths to uphold this particular shared illusion. ↩︎
Satoshi Nakamoto popularized the blockchain mechanism for Bitcoin in a paper from 2008. ↩︎
In all likelihood, wash trading. ↩︎
This is completely legal. NFTs do not prove any kind of ownership. ↩︎
By then the equipment is outdated in the arms race between miners. ↩︎

WhatsApp und die Domestizierung von Nutzern

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This post is a translation of Rohan Kumar’s English post WhatsApp and the domestication of users from the beginning of 2021 into German.

Ich habe WhatsApp nie genutzt und werde es nie nutzen. Nichtsdestotrotz habe ich das Bedürfnis, einen Artikel über WhatsApp zu schreiben, weil es ein perfektes Beispiel ist, um eine Gruppe von Geschäftsmodellen zu verstehen, die auf — wie ich es nenne — der Domestizierung von Nutzern basieren. Da ich die Domestizierung von Nutzern für ein großes Problem halte, ist es eine detaillierte Untersuchung wert.

WhatsApp war nicht der erste Instant Messenger seiner Art und wird wohl auch nicht der letzte sein. Ich habe mich hier nur deshalb auf WhatsApp fokussiert, weil die kürzliche Änderung der Datenschutzerklärung und Geschäftsbedingungen für ein größeres mediales Echo gesorgt haben.

Nach dieser kurzen Metadiskussion, können wir uns dem Problem zuwenden.

WhatsApps Aufstieg

Für diejenigen, denen WhatsApp nichts sagt: es ist ein Tool, dass es Facebook einfach und bequem macht, seine Unternehmensmission voranzubringen: das Versteigern von menschlichem Verhalten (allgemein bekannt als “personalisierte Werbung”). Ursprünglich hat Facebook die Menschen damit überzeugt, dem zuzustimmen, indem sie es — gepaart mit einer simplen Benutzeroberfläche und erfolgreichem Marketing — ermöglicht haben über das Internet mit anderen Menschen zu kommunizieren (was bereits anderweitig möglich war). Später sind mit kostenlosen Anrufen und Videoanrufen weitere Features dazugekommen. Diese kostenlosen Anrufe haben WhatsApp dabei geholfen, die de-facto Kommunikationsplattform in vielen Regionen geworden zu sein. Ich bin jedes mal über WhatsApps Allgegenwart überrascht, wenn ich meine Verwandten in Indien besuche: ich werde häufig mit verwirrten Blicken bedacht, wenn ich sie daran erinnere, dass ich kein WhatsApp nutze.

Das eigene proprietäre Chatprotokoll, dass nicht mit anderen Apps kommunizieren kann, hat es WhatsApp erlaubt, von Netzwerkeffekten zu profitieren: WhatsApps Nutzer waren praktisch gefangen, da ein Löschen von WhatsApp bedeutete, nicht mehr mit anderen WhatsApp Nutzern kommunizieren zu können. Leute, die von WhatsApp wechseln wollen, müssen dementsprechend alle ihre Freunde davon überzeugen, ebenfalls zu wechseln; oft sind auch weniger technisch versierte Freunde darunter, die bereits Schwierigkeiten im Umgang mit WhatsApp hatten.

In der WhatsApp-Welt müssen diejenigen, die mit anderen in Kontakt bleiben wollen, sich an folgende Spielregeln halten:

Man kann ausschließlich die proprietäre WhatsApp Applikation benutzen; das Entwickeln von interoperablen Alternativen wird nicht unterstützt.
Jedermanns Mobiltelefon muss ein Betriebssystem unterstützen, für den die WhatsApp Applikation entwickelt wird. Da WhatsApp Entwickler sich auf die Betriebssysteme mit den größten Marktanteilen fokussieren, stärkt das das iOS und Android Duopol.
Nutzer sind komplett abhängig von den WhatsApp Entwicklern. Wenn die WhatsApp Entwickler entscheiden, benutzerunfreundliche Funktionen einzubauen, müssen die Nutzer es hinnehmen. Sie können nicht einfach zu einem anderen Anbieter oder einer anderen Applikation wechseln, ohne die Fähigkeit zu verlieren, mit ihren WhatsApp Kontakten zu kommunizieren.

Die Domestizierung von Nutzern

WhatsApp ist zu dem aufgestiegen, was es ist, indem es vorher freie Wesen in ihrem Stall eingepfercht hat und ihre Gewohnheiten so änderte, dass sie abhängig wurden. Mit der Zeit wurde es für die Wesen immer schwieriger, zu ihrem vorherigen Leben zurückzukehren. Dieser Prozess sollte bekannt vorkommen: er ist erschreckend ähnlich zu der Domestizierung von Tieren. Ich nenne diese Art von Lock-In deshalb die Domestizierung von Nutzern: das Entfernen von Nutzerautonomie, um Nutzer dazu zu nötigen, den Entwicklern zu dienen.

Ich habe diese Metapher gewählt, weil die Domestizierung von Tieren ein gradueller Prozess ist, nicht immer bewusst abläuft und typischerweise darin besteht, dass eine Gruppe zusehends abhängiger von einer anderen wird. Zum Beispiel: Es gibt Belege dafür, dass die Domestizierung von Hunden mit Sozialisierung angefangen hat, die durch Selektion bestimmter Gene zu mehr Freundlichkeit zu und gesteigerter Abhängigkeit von Menschen führte.¹

Ob die Domestizierung von Nutzern nun gewollt ist oder durch Zufall passiert, sie erfolgt fast immer in diesen drei Schritten:

eine starke Abhängigkeit der Nutzer von den Softwareentwicklern
Nutzer sind durch mindestens eine der folgenden Methoden unfähig gemacht, die von ihnen benutzte Software zu kontrollieren:
1. die Veränderung der Software ist untersagt
2. die Migration auf eine andere Plattform verunmöglicht
die Ausbeutung der nun gefangenen und wehrlosen Nutzer

Das Durchlaufen der ersten zwei Schritte hat WhatsApp Nutzer anfällig für ihre Domestizierung gemacht. Da man Investoren gegenüber rechenschaftspflichtig war, hatten die WhatsApp Manager jeden Grund nutzerunfreundliche Funktionen einzubauen, ohne Konsequenzen fürchten zu müssen.

Und — natürlich — haben sie genau das getan.

WhatsApps Abstieg

Domestizierung hat einen Zweck: Sie ermöglicht, die domestizierte Spezies auszunutzen.

Vor Kurzem hat WhatsApp seine Datenschutzerklärung angepasst, die es erlaubt Daten mit ihrer Muttergesellschaft Facebook zu teilen. Bisherige WhatsApp Nutzer hatten die Wahl: die neuen Nutzungsbedingungen akzeptieren oder WhatsApp nicht mehr nutzen zu können. Das Update der Nutzungsbedingungen ist ein klassisches Beispiel einer Lockvogeltaktik: WhatsApp Nutzer sind mit einer ansprechenden Benutzeroberfläche und dem scheinbaren Versprechen von Privatssphäre angelockt worden, ihrer Autonomie in einem Prozess der Domestizierung beraubt worden, sodass WhatsApp dann im Bezug auf Privatssphäre zurückrudern konnte, ohne ernsthafte Konsequenzen zu fürchten. Jeder Schritt in dieser Folge hat den nächsten ermöglicht; wäre es nicht zur Domestizierung gekommen, wäre es für viele Nutzer ein Leichtes, die Kommunikationsplattform zu wechseln.

Diejenigen von uns, die bereits seit Jahren vor einer solchen Entwicklung warnten, konnten einen kurzen Moment von sadistischer Genugtuung erfahren, als unsere Beschreibung von “nervige und paranoide Verschwörungstheoretiker” zu lediglich “nervig” angepasst wurde.

Ein Versuch zur Schadensbegrenzung

Die Lockvogeltaktik hat zu einer starken Gegenreaktion geführt, die eine ansehnliche Minderheit an WhatsApp Nutzern tatsächlich zum Wechseln bewegt hat; diese Zahl scheint größer gewesen zu sein als der Rundungsfehler von dem WhatsApp wahrscheinlich ausging. Als Antwort darauf, veröffentlichte WhatsApp die folgende Werbeanzeige:

Die Werbung listet verschiedene Daten, die WhatsApp nicht sammelt oder teilt. Datensammelei-Bedenken damit zu begegnen, was man nicht sammelt, ist irreführend. WhatsApp sammelt auch keine Haarproben oder Retina Scans; aber das Nicht-Sammeln dieser Informationen heißt nicht, dass Privatsphäre respektiert wird — weil es nichts an den Informationen ändert, die WhatsApp sammelt.

Die Anzeige streitet das “Loggen von wer wem schreibt oder anruft” ab. Das Sammeln von Daten ist aber nicht gleichzusetzen mit dem Schreiben von Logs; es ist möglich diese Metadaten in einen Algorithmus zu speisen bevor man sie löscht. Das Model kann dadurch auch ohne Logs lernen, dass zwei Nutzer häufig miteinander in Kontakt stehen. Die Tatsache, dass bewusst eine solche Formulierung mit Logs genutzt wurde, impliziert dass WhatsApp solche Daten bereits sammelt und nutzt oder zumindest die Möglichkeit dafür offen lässt.

Ein Blick in die (damals) aktuelle Datenschutzerklärung von WhatsApp zeigt, dass bereits ein beträchtliches Maß an Metadaten gesammelt werden, die für Marketing durch Facebook genutzt werden.

Freie Software

Bei der Domestizierung von Nutzern ist das Bereitstellen von nützlicher Software ein Mittel zum Zweck: nämlich zum Ausbeuten der User. Die Alternative ist einfach: dem Nutzer nützlich zu sein zum Zweck an sich machen.

Um nicht von Software kontrolliert zu werden, müssen Nutzer in Kontrolle sein. Software, die es dem Nutzer erlaubt in Kontrolle zu sein, heißt Freie Software. Das Wort “frei” bezieht sich in diesem Kontext auf Freiheit, nicht auf “gratis”. Freie Software ist mit dem Konzept Open Source verwandt: Letzteres ist eine Reinterpretation von Freier Software, die den Schwerpunkt auf unternehmensfreundliche Praktiken und weniger auf den ethischen Aspekt von Freier Software legt. Eine Bezeichnung, der beide Ansätze subsummiert, ist FLOSS (free, libre, and open source software)².

Andere haben die zugrundeliegenden Konzepte von Freier Software und deren Wichtigkeit bereits beschrieben, also gehe ich hier nicht mehr ins Detail. Aber im Grunde geht es immer um folgende vier Freiheiten, die dem Nutzer eingeräumt werden:

Die Software ohne (geografische, thematische, oder sonstige) Einschränkungen auszuführen.
Die Software zu untersuchen und ggf. den eigenen Bedürfnissen anzupassen.
Die Software mit anderen zu teilen.
Eigene Anpassungen an der Software mit anderen zu teilen.

Geld verdienen mit Freier Software

Der gängigste Einwand zu FLOSS ist, dass es schwieriger sei, damit Geld zu verdienen.

Der Schlüssel, um Geld mit freier Software verdienen zu können, ist, komplementäre Produkte zu vertreiben. Als Beispiele seien hier Support, Konfiguration, Beratung, Training, Hosting, Hardware oder Zertifizierungen genannt. Viele Unternehmen setzen bereits auf diesen Ansatz: Red Hat, Collabora, System76, Purism, Canonical, SUSE, Hashicorp, Databricks, and Gradle sind nur ein paar Beispiele, die mir einfallen.

Allerdings ist Hosting allein kein vielversprechender Ansatz, da es Giganten wie AWS im Zweifel billiger können. Aber Entwickler der Software zu sein, kann einem Vorteile im Bereich Konfiguration, Support und Training geben, während es im reinen Hosting nicht unbedingt von Vorteil ist.

FLOSS ist nicht immer genug

Freie Software ist ein notwendiges aber kein hinreichendes Kriterium, um der Domestizierung von Nutzern vorzubeugen. Zwei weitere Kriterien sind Einfachheit und Offenheit.

Einfachheit

Wenn Software komplex wird, muss sie von einem großen Entwickler-Team unterstützt werden. Nutzer, die nicht mit den Entwicklern einverstanden sind, können die Software nicht mehr leicht abändern, da sie nicht die Resourcen haben, mehrere Millionen Zeilen Code zu betreuen. Besonders dann, wenn in diesem Code, stets neue Sicherheitslücken gefunden werden können. Außerdem kann die erhöhte Komplexität der Software dazu führen, dass das Entwickler-Team nutzerunfreundliche, aber kommerzialisierbare Features einbaut, um die steigenden Entwicklungskosten zu decken.

Komplexe Software, die nicht von einem anderen, als dem bestehenden Entwickler-Team entwickelt werden kann, kreiert eine Abhängigkeit vom Entwickler: Schritt eins in der Domestizierung von Nutzern. Das allein öffnet die Tür für allerlei problematische Entwicklungen.

Fallstudie: Mozilla und das World Wide Web

Mozilla war ein Funken Hoffnung in den Browserkriegen — einem Feld, das dominiert war von Adtech, Überwachung, und Vendor Lock-In. Leider ist das Entwickeln einer Browser Engine ein solch monumentales Unterfangen, dass sogar Opera und Microsoft aufegegeben haben und lediglich Chromium redesignen. Browser tun heutzutage mehr als nur Dokumente anzeigen (ihre ursprüngliche Aufgabe): sie sind zu einer Umgebung für allerlei Apps geworden mit einem eigenen Zugang zu Resourcen wie der GPU, Bluetooth, Media Codecs, DRM³, Erweiterungs-APIs, etc. Die Liste ist schier unendlich. Es kostet jährlich Milliarden, um Schwachstellen in einer so großen Angriffsfläche zu schließen und gleichzeitig mit einem sich immer schneller entwickelnden Web-Standard Schritt zu halten. Diese Milliarden müssen irgendwo herkommen.

Mozilla musste große Kompromisse eingehen, um überleben zu können. Es ist Deals mit offen nutzerfeindlichen Unternehmen eingegangen und bündelte ihren Browser mit Werbung und Bloatware wie Pocket. Seit der Übernahme von Pocket, die zur Diversifizierung von Einnahmen unternommen wurde, hat Mozilla seine Versprechen nicht eingelöst: Während die Pocket clients mittlerweile Freie Software sind, ist der Code auf dem Server immer noch proprietär. Diesen Code zu befreien und Teile davon abzuändern, wäre aufgrund der Komplexität von Pocket erneut ein schwieriges Unterfangen.

Abspaltungen von Firefox wie Pale Moon sind nicht in der Lage mit der immer weiter steigenden Komplexität von Web Standards mitzuhalten. Kürzlich musste Pale Moon seinen Code von GitHub wegmigrieren, weil GitHub begonnen hat, Web Components einzusetzen, welche Pale Moon selbst nicht unterstützt. Es ist praktisch unmöglich, einen neuen Browser von Grund auf zu entwickeln, und die alt eingesessenen Platzhirsche (die seit Jahren mit riesigen Summen an Geld am Laufen gehalten werden) einzuholen. Nutzer können effektiv lediglich zwischen einer Browser Engine, die von Mozilla (Gecko), einer Adtech Firma (Blick von Google), oder einem walled garden Anbieter (WebKit von Apple) entwickelt wird, wählen. WebKit scheint ein gutes Produkt zu sein, aber Nutzer wären erneut hilflos, wenn Apple im Alleingang etwas nutzerfeindliches beschließt.

Kurz gesagt: die Komplexität des Web hat Mozilla — den einzige Browser Engine Entwickler, der vorgibt, “dem Nutzer zu dienen, nicht dem Profit” — dazu gezwungen, nutzerfeindliche Features in ihren Browser einzubauen. Die Komplexität des Web hat Nutzer in die Situation gebracht, lediglich die Wahl aus drei, immer dominanteren, Browser Engines zu haben, deren Entwickler starken Interessenskonflikten unterliegen.

Um Missverständnissen vozubeugen: Ich glaube nicht, dass Mozilla eine bösartige Organisation ist; ganz im Gegenteil bin ich erstaunt, dass sie in der Lage sind so viel zu leisten, ohne noch weitergehende Kompromisse einzugehen, obwohl das System, in dem sie sich bewegen, es praktisch verlangt. Ihr Kernprodukt ist nach wie vor FLOSS und leicht angepasste Versionen entfernen die Antifeatures.

Offene Plattformen

Um zu verhindern, dass Netzwerkeffekte in einen Vendor Lock-in überschlagen, muss Software, in der natürliche Netzwerkeffekte auftreten, unbedingt Teil einer offenen Infrastruktur sein. Im Fall von Kommunikationssoftware und Messengern muss es möglich sein, alternative Clients und Server-Implementationen zu entwickeln, die miteinander kompatibel sind. Das verhindert effektiv den Abschluss der ersten zwei Schritte der Domestizierung von Usern.

Fallstudie: Signal

Seit ein bestimmter Autoverkäufer “Nutzt Signal” tweetete, sind viele Nutzer fügsam gewechselt. Aktuell sind die Signal Clients und Server FLOSS und nutzen eine der stärksten Ende-zu-Ende-Verschlüsselung; ich bin trotzdem kein Fan.

Auch wenn Signals Clients und Server FLOSS sind, bleibt Signal eine geschlossene Plattform. Signal Gründer Moxie Marlinspike ist, wie er in einem Blogpost ausführt⁴, skeptisch gegenüber offenen und föderierten Plattformen. Das heißt, es gibt keine Möglichkeit, eine alternative Serverimplementation zu entwickeln, der von bestehenden Clients unterstützt wird oder aber einen alternativen Client, der von bestehender Serversoftware unterstützt wird. Schritt eins auf dem Weg zur Domestizierung von Nutzern ist praktisch abgeschlossen.

Abgesehen davon, dass es nur jeweils eine Client und Server Implementation gibt, gibt es lediglich einen Betreiber von Signal Servern: Signal Messenger LLC. Die Abhängigkeit der Signalnutzer von diesem zentralen Serverbetreiber hat kürzlich bereits zu einem mehr als tagelangen Ausfall geführt, als — im Angesicht des massiven Anstiegs von Nutzerzahlen — der einzige Serverbetreiber erst nachbessern musste.

Nichtsdestotrotz haben Leute versucht, alternative Signal Clients zu entwickeln: Ein Fork namens LibreSignal hat versucht, Signal auf privatsphäreorientierten Android Telefonen ohne Google Play Services zum Laufen zu bringen. Die Entwicklung dieses Clients wurde eingestellt, als Moxie klargemacht hat, dass er es nicht in Ordnung findet, dass Drittparteien Signals Server nutzen. Moxies Entscheidung ist nachvollziehbar; aber diese Situation hätte von vornherein verhindert werden können, wenn Signal nicht von einem einzigen Serveranbieter abhängig wäre.

Wenn Signal entscheiden sollte, ihre Apps so anzupassen, dass sie userfeindliche Features bekommt, werden Nutzer genauso hilflos sein wie jetzt mit WhatsApp. Auch wenn ich es für unwahrscheinlich halte, so belässt Signals geschlossene Plattform Nutzer anfällig für Domestizierung.

Obwohl ich Signal nicht mag, empfehle ich den Messenger meinen technisch weniger versierten Freunden, weil es der einzige Messenger ist, der privat genug für mich und einfach genug für sie ist. Wenn auch nur der geringste Einrichtungsaufwand (Accounterstellung, manuelles Hinzufügen von Kontakten, etc.) nötig gewesen wäre, wäre einer meiner Freunde bei Discord oder WhatsApp geblieben. Ich würde ja etwas von wegen “du weißt, dass von dir die Rede ist” sagen, wenn auch nur die geringste Chance bestünde, dass er in diesem Artikel so weit gekommen wäre.

Denkanstöße

Beide vorhergehenden Fallstudien — Mozilla und Signal — sind Beispiele von wohlwollenden Organisationen, die ihre Nutzer ungewollt anfällig für Domestizierung machen. Im Falle von Mozilla ist das die Folge von Komplexität auf einer offenen Plattform. Im Falle von Signal ist die Folge einer einfacheren, aber geschlossenen Plattform. Leider spielen die (in beiden Fällen gute) Absichten bei der Einschätzung zur Gefahr, ob Nutzer domestiziert werden können, keine Rolle.

paulsnar hat mich auf den möglichen Zielkonflikt zwischen Einfachheit und Offenheit aufmerksam gemacht:

Ich habe den Eindruck, dass sich Einfachheit und Offenheit entgegenstehen; Um Signal als Beispiel zu nehmen: dass das Programm simpel ist, ist unter anderem darauf zurückzuführen, dass es eine geschlossene Plattform ist — zumindest argumentiert Moxie so. Matrix andererseits mag einfach erscheinen, aber das dahinterstehende Protokol ist komplex genau weil es eine offene Plattform garantiert.

Ich habe keine einfache Antwort auf dieses Dilemma. Es ist wahr, dass Matrix (im Vergleich zu Alternativen wie IRC oder XMPP) außerordentlich komplex ist. Und es ist ebenfalls wahr, dass es schwieriger ist, eine offene Plattform zu entwickeln. Dennoch ist er möglich, Komplexität bei offenen Plattformen im Rahmen zu halten: Gemini, IRC oder aber Email sind Beispiele dafür. Auch wenn Email Standards nicht annähernd so einfach sind wie Gemini oder IRC, entwickeln sie sich langsam. Das verhindert, dass Implementationen ständig aufholen müssen wie es beispielsweise Webbrowser oder Matrix Clients und Server tun müssen.

Nicht jede Software muss Milliarden einbringen. Föderation erlaubt es Netzwerken wie dem Fediverse oder XMPP große Nutzerzahlen zu bedienen, ohne dass ein Gigant seine Seele verkaufen muss, um die Kosten zu decken. Obwohl domestizierungsresistente Geschäftsmodelle weniger profitabel sind, lassen sie dennoch die Entwicklung derselben Technologien zu, die durch die Domestizierung von Nutzern möglich wurden. Alles was fehlt, ist ein Marketingbudget: die meiste Werbung für viele dieser Projekte sind lange, unbezahlte Blogposts.

Vielleicht dürfen wir nicht allein auf Wachstum zielen und versuchen, es auf Teufel komm raus “groß zu machen”. Vielleicht können wir aufhören, sobald wir bei einem Projekt finanzielle Nachhaltigkeit erreicht haben; und damit letztendlich möglich machen, mit weniger mehr zu erreichen.

Abschließende Hinweise

Bevor dieser Text zu einer Art Manifest wurde, war es als eine Ausführung zu einem Kommentar gedacht, den ich unter einem Fediverse Post von Binyamin Green gemacht habe.

Anfangs habe ich mich aus persönlichen Gründen dazu entschieden, die Ausführungen in ihre jetzige Form zu bringen. Heutzutage fragen Leute jedes Mal nach einer Begründung warum ich etwas nicht nutze, was “jede(r)” nutzt (WhatsApp, Microsoft Office, Windows, macOS, Google Docs, …). Normalerweise wird meine Begründung ignoriert, auch wenn sie erwartet wird. Das nächste Mal, wenn wir uns treffen, haben sie meine Begründung bereits vergessen und wir spielen denselben Dialog nochmals durch. Meine Lebensentscheidungen jedes Mal durch logisch korrekte Aussagen aufs Neue rechtfertigen zu müssen — wohlwissend, dass sie erneut ignoriert werden — ist ein emotional anstrengender Prozess, der sich in den letzten Jahren negativ auf meine psychische Gesundheit ausgewirkt hat; meinen Freunden diesen Artikel zu senden und das Thema anschließend zu wechseln, sollte mir das ein oder andere graue Haar ersparen.

Dieser Artikel erweitert die Leitprinzipien der Freie Software und Copyleft Bewegungen. Dank geht an Barna Zsombor für gutes Feedback über IRC.

Da 2900 Worte nicht ausreichend waren, habe ich eine Fortsetzung geschrieben: Plattformen offen halten. Wirf' einen Blick, falls du diesen Artikel interessant fandest.

Pierotti, R.; Fogg, B. (2017). The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved. Yale University Press. ↩︎
Viele innerhalb der Freien Software Bewegung mögen den Begriff “Open Source” aus vielerlei Gründen nicht. Andere nutzen die Begriffe “Freie Software” und “Open Source” synonym. Und nicht zuletzt nutzen viele Firmen den Begriff “free” mit Blick auf den Preis und nicht in Hinsicht auf Freiheit — weshalb einige Freie Software Aktivisten den Begriff “libre” nutzen. Das alles kann recht verwirrend sein, weshalb ich es bevorzuge von FLOSS zu sprechen, der die Schnittmenge dieser Konzepte beschreibt. ↩︎
Siehe Defective by Design. DRM ist ein weiteres klassisches Beispiel von der Domestizierung von Nutzern. Mozilla hat versucht zu verhindern, dass DRM zu einem Webstandard wird; aber hat DRM in seinem Browser implementiert, nachdem es von anderen W3C Mitgliedern überstimmt wurde. Das entschuldigt zwar nicht, DRM in einem Browser zu unterstützen, aber zeigt, dass bei Mozilla zumindest kein böser Wille vorlag. Dasselbe kann nicht über die anderen, pro-DRM W3C Mitglieder gesagt werden. ↩︎
Moxies Blogpost hat viele Repliken bekommen. Zwei gute sind die von Linux Weekly News und Matrix.org. ↩︎

Reverse tethering with Android

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

You’ve most likely found yourself in situations where you needed internet on your computer but had no WiFi network close-by. What do you do? Fire up a hotspot from your smartphone and share its internet connection with the laptop. The technical term for sharing a phone’s internet connection with another device — be it over WiFi, Bluetooth or USB — is tethering.

Recently, however, I found myself in the opposite position: I had internet on my laptop but not on my phone! Reverse tethering to the rescue!

The Replicant Situation

In one of my experiments, I flashed Replicant — a fully free, Android-based operating system for mobile phones — onto an old Samsung Galaxy S2.

Now, since Replicant is fully free, it does not come with the proprietary drivers necessary to operate the WiFi module in that phone. That means, the only way to get an internet connection on the phone is through the mobile data (3G) on a SIM card. Now, in addition to the (for current standard) sluggishness of the processor, this rules the phone out as a daily driver for me¹. Nonetheless, I was curious what I could do with Replicant running on the phone.

After the initial excitement that Free Software could power a phone where most functionalities are provided, the phone ended up unused in one of my drawers.

When writing the blog post on BOINC, where I call on people to use their computing devices as long as they work, my unused Samsung Galaxy S2 came to my mind.

I was fairly confident that I could install the BOINC Android client from the F-Droid store on the phone, too. But I had to get internet on it somehow… Especially as I also wanted to upload/download BOINC tasks completed on the S2 later on as well.

Reverse Tethering with `gnirehtet`

After some browsing, I found gnirehtet: a program which enables you to share your computer’s internet connection with your Android device over USB with adb.

Installation

To set up gnirehtet on your computer and Android phone, just follow the steps as outlined in the project’s README: this should get you up and running with reverse tethering.

Optional CLI parameters to `gnirehtet`

Now, gnirehtet’s README (understandably) does not list all command line options it supports. You can get this info by running gnirehtet --help.

In my case I needed to execute gnirehtet run on a different port because the default port of 31416 was used on my machine already. The -p option allows you to specify the port to run gnirehtet on.

Putting `gnirehtet` in `$PATH`

After experimenting with gnirehtet and convincing myself that it does the job, I decided to make the executable findable by my shell. Thus, I would not have to specify the full path to the gnirehtet executable every time I want to run it.

To that end, I first copied the folder containing the gnirehtet executable into /opt - a directory “reserved for the installation of add-on application software packages” according to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

Then, I checked what my PATH environment variable looked like with echo $PATH. Since /usr/bin was on my $PATH, I decided to simply create a symlink in /usr/bin which points to the gnirehtet executable in /opt. Works like a charm.

I have heard of people whose needs were satisfied with this setup, so it might work for you as well. ↩︎

Dodging Digital Colonialism

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Under construction …

Citizen Science with BOINC

Sat, 18 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

After I replaced my old smartphone, which hasn’t been receiving Lineage OS security updates for a long time anymore, I was looking for good uses for the device. Given it’s age, looks, and lack of software updates, selling it would have been a challenge. Porting postmarketOS onto it would have been interesting, but realistically I lack time (and skill?) for that. Throwing a working device away was definitely not an option; but just having it lying around also felt wasteful.

Luckily I remembered about the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) and the science projects it powers.

What is BOINC?

According to the BOINC project’s website, the

BOINC [platform] lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer. The BOINC app, running on your computer, downloads scientific computing jobs and runs them invisibly in the background.

Basically, the BOINC platform enables you to donate (unused) computing power of your devices to computationally intensive science projects around the world. This (non-exhaustive) list of projects gives an overview of problems where scientists would appreciate your computing power donations.

From a software perspective, the BOINC platform is a free and open-source middleware application which you install on your computing device (desktop, laptop, Android smartphone or tablet¹, RaspberryPi — you name it). However, in and of itself, the BOINC app does not do anything.

To actually do some computing, you need to register for one of the different BOINC projects. Then you can connect the BOINC app on your device to the project and start downloading tasks for a specific application of the project (each project can have multiple applications requiring computational resources).

Once the tasks have been downloaded they will be worked on as per your settings. You can set certain CPU/RAM resource limits, battery thresholds and much more in the BOINC app to tailor under what circumstances your device runs computations. Once the device has worked through all the tasks, it sends the results back to the server and retrieves a new batch of tasks.

Back to my old Lineage OS phone

After installing the BOINC app from the F-Droid store on my old smartphone, I had to choose from projects

whose tasks can be calculated on an Android phone, and
whose applications were licensed under a free and open-source license.

The first condition is a technical one and simply a result of the fact that not all projects and applications support all platforms. But this condition was relatively easy to meet, as the Android BOINC app already provides you with a selection of projects which work on Android.

The second condition is an ethical one and — unfortunately — was much harder to meet. I strive to not run proprietary software on any of my computing devices as it is defective by design. In addition to that, I firmly believe that science should be as transparent and open as possible. Now, many BOINC projects' applications are not well documented and thus, it turned out to be difficult to find their licensing terms². In case of the Android capable projects, only the Einstein@home project was very open about the fact that it is free software³.

For your reference, I have created an overview of BOINC projects and applications which are free software.

Once I had connected to my Einstein@home account from the BOINC application on my old phone, my old device has been successfully repurposed and is now happily looking for pulsars ;)

BOINC on a GNU/Linux machine

Given that I also had an idle RaspberryPi available, I decided to give it some BOINC work, too. The following steps can be generalized to all GNU/Linux powered machines, you just might have to replace the apt package manager utility calls in this guide with calls to the package manager of your distribution.

# install the BOINC command line tool:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install boinc-client
# connect the boinc client to your project account:
$ boinccmd --lookup_account <projectURL> <email> <password>

This should give you an output similar to this

status: Success

poll status: operation in progress
poll status: operation in progress

account key: <your_account_key>

Proceed with:

$ boinccmd --project_attach <projectURL> <your_account_key>
# clear the current bash session history so that your passwords are not exposed
$ history -c
# get an overview of attached projects and active tasks:
$ boinccmd --get_simple_gui_info

That’s already it. More boinccmd command line options (e.g. for suspending the work on BOINC projects or stop the download of new work) can be found here.

If you feel like customizing your BOINC configuration, you have to adapt /var/lib/boinc-client/cc_config.xml and run boinccmd --read_cc_config subsequently. All client configuration options can be found in this BOINC wiki entry.

BOINC and energy consumption

Please take into account that doing computational work will make your device require more energy and (depending on your device) have a noticeable impact on your electricity bill.

For what it is worth, I am convinced though that if you already own a computing device which you struggle to find use for, you might as well use it for what it was designed: compute. A lot of energy goes into the production of computing devices and by not utilizing them until they fail afterwards, that initial energy cost goes “wasted”⁴. And since you’re not senselessly computing SHA-256 but advancing human knowledge, you are putting energy and computing capability to good use. But if you are really concerned about the environmental impact of using more energy than necessary, run BOINC computations in winter only: Then the generated heat from the computations can also warm your home.

Free Software BOINC projects and applications

Project	Application	License	source
Einstein@home	Gravitational Wave search	GPLv2	git repo
Einstein@home	Binary Pulsar Radio search	GPLv2 (?)
Einstein@home	Gamma-ray Pulsar search	GPLv2 (?)
LPC@home	SixTrack	LGPLv2	git repo
DENIS@home	all of them	Apache v2	git repos

The latest version of the BOINC Android app can only be downloaded from the F-Droid store (which you should be using anyways) as some Google Play Store policies prevent BOINC from being distributed there. ↩︎
I have reached out to the BOINC administrators whether it would be possible to indicate whether the projects run free or proprietary software on your device. ↩︎
I have made a request to properly provide access to the source code of all of the Einstein@home applications. ↩︎
E.g. if you use a smartphone for 3 years, ~80% of the total energy consumption over the whole lifecycle have been spent on producing the device. ↩︎

Librebooting a ThinkPad T400

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This post will describe how you can replace the proprietary Lenovo firmware on a ThinkPad T400 laptop with libreboot.

Libreboot versions from November 2022 onwards ship binary blobs to support more boards. GNU boot is a libre alternative.

None of what I am writing here is new - much rather it is a structured guide which integrates different sources on the world wide web, most notably,

the official Libreboot documentation on installation on the T400,
this Reddit post on how to install libreboot on a ThinkPad X200 with a RaspberryPi,
this personal account of installing libreboot on a ThinkPad W500, and
part 1 and part 2 of another personal librebooting account

with my own experiences.

If you find that this project is too much hassle but would still like to own a laptop with the proprietary BIOS replaced and an FSF-endorsed free GNU+Linux distribution installed, you can buy one here from the lead developer of libreboot. If you’re up to the challenge, however, keep on reading.

1. Preparation

There are some steps you’ll need to take to get some information about your T400 which will come in handy during the installation itself but also for deciding on which tools you need for the installation process to begin with.

1.1 Update the Embedded Controller (EC) firmware

Libreboot replaces the BIOS, not the Embedded Controller firmware. Since you can’t update the EC firmware while running libreboot, you’ll want to do that beforehand.

So, first check which are the latest BIOS and EC versions for your T400 on this Lenovo support page. As of writing, the latest versions for BIOS ID 7Uxxxxxx-based computers are BIOS 3.24 and EC 1.06, while for BIOS ID 7Vxxxxxx-based computers it is BIOS 3.25 and EC 1.06.

To check which versions are currently installed on your T400, shut down the laptop, boot it up again but press the blue ThinkVantage button to interrupt the normal startup and then F1 to enter the BIOS. On the resulting screen you should see the BIOS version and the Embedded Controller Version:

If you realize that your T400 has the latest BIOS and EC versions installed, jump to the next preparation step. Otherwise:

If Windows is currently still installed on the laptop, use the Lenovo System Update utility to update the BIOS and EC firmware.

In case the laptop is already running Linux, you might find useful info on how to upgrade the EC version here. Since I don’t have experience for that case, my guide will be of no help to you in this particular matter.

Once you’re done updating the EC firmware, double check in the BIOS again whether all worked as expected.

1.2 Noting the device’s MAC address

While you’re on the BIOS overview screen, also write down the laptop’s MAC adress.

1.3 Getting the size of the flash chip

Change the BIOS settings to startup from a USB device under Startup -> Boot such that a USB HDD drive is the first disk the BIOS tries to boot from:

Then insert a bootable USB device with a live Linux distribution of your liking. Boot it, open the Terminal and run

$ sudo dmidecode | grep "ROM Size"

If the command returns a ROM Size of 8192 kB, you need the 16 pin SOIC clip. If the chip has a size of only 4096 kB, get the 8 pin clip.

2. Disassembly & Flashing

Libreboot runs on a chip which is hidden on the very bottom of the T400 (on the backside of the motherboard to be precise). Since we need physical access to the chip for flashing it, we’ll have to completely disassemble the T400 (unless you’re really lazy).

2.1 Prerequisites

Before we start disassembling the laptop, please ensure you that have all the required tools for the flashing process:

any RPR GPIO capable flashing device e.g. RaspberryPi, A64-OlinuXino or BeagleBoneBlack¹
female-to-female jumper cables (optimally of approx. 10cm length)
8 or 16 (as determined earlier) pin SOIC clip²
CPU thermal paste (e.g. Arctic MX-4), isopropyl alcohol, and an anti-static cloth
screwdriver

Since you’ll be opening up the laptop completely, it is also the time to consider some hardware upgrades:

WiFi chip: The built-in Intel WiFi chip will not run with non-free drivers. Therefore, I strongly recommend to replace it with an Atheros chip which is supported by the free ath9k driver, e.g. Atheros AR5B95.
RAM: The currently installed memory cards in the T400 might be incompatible with Libreboot or just too little for your taste. If you decide to buy RAM, make sure the new chips comply with Libreboot’s requirements. I’ll be using 2x4GB 2xR8 RAM chips³ to get the most out of the T400.
SSD: An SSD will significantly improve the speed of your T400 when compared to a HDD. The laptop will also run more quietly.

2.2 Prepare the flashing device

SSH into your flashing device so that you do not have to attach it to a separate screen and keyboard.

2.2.1 Enable the SPI

On a Raspberry Pi, the Serial Peripheral Interface is disabled by default. To enable it, open /boot/config.txt in your favorite editor, uncomment dtparam=spi=on, and reboot the device. Check if you successfully enabled the SPI by running

$ ls -l /dev/spidev*

You should see something along the lines of

crw-rw---- 1 root spi 153, 0 Jan 26 20:08 /dev/spidev0.0
crw-rw---- 1 root spi 153, 1 Jan 26 20:08 /dev/spidev0.1

2.2.2 Install `flashrom`

Install flashrom by running

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install flashrom

2.2.3 Get the libreboot files

Now, download the libreboot source⁴, the relevant roms for the T400 (make sure to specify your flash chip size), and the latest public key of the signing key pair:

# libreboot source & signature file:
$ wget https://rsync.libreboot.org/testing/20210522/libreboot-20210522_src.tar.xz
$ wget https://rsync.libreboot.org/testing/20210522/libreboot-20210522_src.tar.xz.sig
# libreboot T400 roms and signature file:
$ wget https://rsync.libreboot.org/testing/20210522/roms/libreboot-20210522_t400_<4/8>mb.tar.xz
$ wget https://rsync.libreboot.org/testing/20210522/roms/libreboot-20210522_t400_<4/8>mb.tar.xz.sig
# public key of signing key pair:
$ wget https://libreboot.org/lbkey.asc

Then run

# import the public key of the signing key pair:
$ gpg --import lbkey.asc
# verify that the signature files match the archives:
$ gpg --verify libreboot-20210522_src.tar.xz.sig
$ gpg --verify libreboot-20210522_t400_<4/8>mb.tar.xz.sig

You should see gpg: Good signature from "Leah Rowe <info@minifree.org>" [unknown] for both gpg --verify commands.

Now extract the different roms for your laptop model with

$ tar xvf libreboot-20210522_t400_<4/8>mb.tar.xz

Copy the .rom which you are planning to use to the parent directory as libreboot.rom with

$ cp libreboot-20210522_t400_<4/8>mb/grub_t400_<4/8>mb_libgfxinit_corebootfb_<YOUR_KEYBOARD_LAYOUT>.rom libreboot.rom

Finally, extract the libreboot source with

$ tar xvf libreboot-20210522_src.tar.xz

This can take a while. Once the archive in unpacked, navigate to the ich9utils directory in the extracted libreboot source and run make there. This will generate the binaries with which you can later adapt the MAC address in libreboot.rom.

2.3 Laptop disassembly

Now we’ll start with the actual disassembly process:

Shut down the T400.
Remove the battery from the T400 and unplug the laptop.
Disassemmble the laptop as described here until you have access to the ROM chip. Do yourself the favor and keep the screws in order and close to the elements where they are supposed to go.

2.4 Flashing libreboot

2.4.1 Connect to the BIOS chip

As a precaution, disconnect your flashing device from power.

Now, you’ll have to wire the GPIO pins of your flashing device to the respective pins on your SOIC clip with the jumper cables. Therefore, you need to understand the GPIO pin layout of your flashing device and the pin numbering on the BIOS chip. Pay close attention to wiring the chip up correctly as mistakes here will make establishing a connection with the chip impossible later on or might even damage your device.

Since I used a RaspberryPi 3 and have an 8MB ROM chip, my wiring layout was the following:

SPI Pin Name	Pin # ROM chip	Pin # RaspberryPi⁵
3.3V	2	1
CS#	7	24
MISO	8	21
GND	10	25
MOSI	15	19
CLK	16	23

If your chip size/flashing device combination is different, please refer to the libreboot docs on the wiring instructions.

Once you’ve wired everything up, connect the flashing device to power and check whether the chip is found by flashrom:

$ flashrom -p linux_spi:dev=/dev/spidev0.0,spispeed=32768
flashrom v1.1-rc1-48-g2d7ab69 on Linux 4.19.66-v7+ (armv7l)
flashrom is free software, get the source code at https://flashrom.org

Using clock_gettime for delay loops (clk_id: 1, resolution: 1ns).
Found Winbond flash chip "W25X64" (8192 kB, SPI) on linux_spi.
No operations were specified.

Make sure you see a line that says Found ... flash chip "YOUR_CHIP_NAME".... If the chip cannot be found, doublecheck your wiring and see whether the clip sits properly.

A quick note on the spispeed parameter: On a RaspberryPi you should be fine with spispeed=32768 in all calls to flashrom. This will speed up all chip reading/writing operations considerably. For less reliable devices like the BeagleBoneBlack, however, you will want to stick with spispeed=512 or spispeed=256.

2.4.2 Backup current BIOS

Read the current BIOS from the chip 3 times and save it in 3 separate .rom files:

$ sudo flashrom -c "YOUR_CHIP_NAME" -p linux_spi:dev=/dev/spidev0.0,spispeed=32768 -r bios_<1/2/3>.rom

Once you have 3 copies of the BIOS, double check whether they are identical (thereby making sure that the connection is stable):

$ sha1sum bios*.rom

The resulting checksums should all match.

In the best case you will not need these .rom images anymore, but in case something goes awry in the next steps, you’ll be able to restore the Lenovo BIOS with them.

2.4.3 Set the MAC address

If you want to use the Ethernet box of your laptop after installing libreboot, you’ll have to set the MAC address to what it has been previously. If you’re fine with using WiFi (see the note on WiFi chip compatibilities), you can skip this section. For more information on this topic, consult the official libreboot documentation on the ich9utils.

Go to the ich9utils directory of the libreboot source. Check whether the bios_1.rom you exported from the BIOS chip contains the same MAC address which you wrote down earlier with:

$ ./ich9show path/to/bios_1.rom | grep MAC

In a second step, run

$ ./ich9gen --macaddress <YOUR_MAC_ADDRESS>

This will generate files which contain the descriptor+GbE region for the libreboot.rom. Copy the ich9fdgbe_<YOUR_CHIP_SIZE>m.bin file to the directory which contains the libreboot.rom. In that directory then, run

$ dd if=ich9fdgbe_<YOUR_CHIP_SIZE>m.bin of=libreboot.rom bs=12k count=1 conv=notrunc
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
12288 bytes (12 kB, 12 KiB) copied, 0.000812598 s, 15.1 MB/s

You can double check if everything worked fine with running

$ ./ich9show path/to/libreboot.rom | grep MAC

in the ich9utils directory. You should see the MAC address of your device as you’ve specified it.

2.4.4 Flash it!

Finally, run

$ sudo flashrom -p linux_spi:dev=/dev/spidev0.0,spispeed=32768 -w libreboot.rom
flashrom v1.1-rc1-48-g2d7ab69 on Linux 4.19.66-v7+ (armv7l)
flashrom is free software, get the source code at https://flashrom.org

Using clock_gettime for delay loops (clk_id: 1, resolution: 1ns).
Found Winbond flash chip "W25X64" (8192 kB, SPI) on linux_spi.
Reading old flash chip contents... done.
Erasing and writing flash chip... Erase/write done.
Verifying flash... VERIFIED.

in the directory containing libreboot.rom to install libreboot on the BIOS chip. Make sure you see the Verifying flash... VERIFIED. message. If not, try again.

2.5 Reassemble and test the installation

Power off and disconnect your flashing device from power, then disconnect the SOIC clip from the chip.

Assemble the laptop back to such an extent that you can boot it up and see what the bootup screen looks like. When reapplying the heat sink, completely remove the old thermal paste (on both chips) using the isopropyl alcohol and replace it with fresh one. Also, replace the WiFi chip (if you have one compatible with free drivers); otherwise remove the old Intel one - it is not gonna work without binary blobs anyways.

If you power on your device and don’t see the Lenovo BIOS option anymore, you’re good! Properly reassemble your T400 now.

3. Congratulations!

You made it! You’ve replaced the proprietary Lenovo BIOS on your ThinkPad T400 with libreboot!

Now feel free to install a GNU+Linux distribution of your liking. To keep the laptop 100% Free Software easily, you might want to consider one of the free GNU+Linux distributions as defined by the FSF.

BeagleBoneBlack is not recommended anymore. ↩︎
I recommend the Pomona SOIC clips. They are slightly more expensive than the ones one can find on Ebay but of good quality. You don’t want to experience issues with broken contacts when flashing or having to mess around with fitting the jumper cables on too thinly aranged pins. ↩︎
In my case, the Crucial CT51264BF160B 4GB DDR3L-1600 SODIMM 1.35V. ↩︎
Please note that this is a testing release of libreboot. According to the official documentation, the T400 board should be well tested though; so I figured I might go ahead with the most recent libreboot release. Once libreboot is installed, you can also update it without disassembling the laptop again. ↩︎
As counted here. ↩︎

PinePhone postmarketOS upgrade

Mon, 24 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

After watching Nathan Freitas’ Libreplanet 2021 keynote on “Ten years of empowering activists AND everyday people through free mobile software” in which he briefly mentioned the PinePhone, I grabbed mine from the bottom drawer of my wardrobe and booted it up for the first time in a while.

After fooling around with it for a little and upgrading the installed software packages, I noticed an “Upgrade” app which I had not seen before: It turns out that a new postmarketOS version has been released.

So, I went to work on upgrading my PinePhone.

Prerequisites

My efforts were initially stopped short, as I did not have a free microSD card at hand. Make sure you have one available which you can temporarily use (once you’re through with the postmarketOS upgrade you are free to use it as you wish again) and flash (all data currently on the microSD card will be deleted).

Upgrade steps

The following steps describe what I did to update my PinePhone to the new “stable”¹ postmarketOS v21.03. I have largely followed the postmarketOS installation tutorial for the PinePhone but felt like it lacked structure at times (mostly due to the fact that it covers many different options). I hope this guide can clear up some ambiguity.

Decide from which device you want to flash your microSD card. You can do it from any desktop computer/laptop running GNU/Linux if you have a microSD card reader/adapter. Alternatively, you can just use the PinePhone itself (in this case, I’d recommend you to SSH into your PinePhone to avoid typing long commands on the phone; it is not necessary though).
Make a backup of your home directory via rsync over SSH, in case you want to save data from your phone’s /home directory. This step is optional, but recommended. It requires a second device.
Download the right postmarketOS image for the PinePhone.
1. Open the postmarketOS builds directory. Select the interface you want to use, then choose the latest build date. From the resulting directory download the ...installer.img.xz and the ...installer.img.xz.sha512 files:
```
$ cd Downloads
$ wget <link to ...installer.img.xz file>
$ wget <link to ...installer.img.xz.sha512 file>
```
2. Check the downloaded installer image for corruption:
```
$ sha512sum -c <path to ...installer.img.xz.sha512 file>
```
  This step is optional but recommended.
Flash the downloaded image to the microSD card: 0. Plug in the microSD card into the device from which you want to flash it. If you’re using the PinePhone for the upgrade, make sure to not put the microSD in the SIM card slot.
1. Now you have to figure out the device name of your microSD card. The safest way to do this is to run lsblk once with the microSD inserted, remove the microSD card, run lsblk again, and see which entry has disappeared. Alternatively, if your microSD card has a different size than all other storage devices, you can run
```
$ lsblk
# NAME         MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
# mmcblk0      179:0    0 59.5G  0 disk
# └─mmcblk0p1  179:1    0 59.5G  0 part
# mmcblk2      179:32   0 14.5G  0 disk
# ├─mmcblk2p1  179:33   0  121M  0 part /boot
# └─mmcblk2p2  179:34   0 14.3G  0 part
# mmcblk2boot0 179:64   0    4M  1 disk
# mmcblk2boot1 179:96   0    4M  1 disk
```
  only once and determine the device name of the microSD card by looking for the device with the size of your microSD card. Make sure that the type of the device is disk not part.
2. With the microSD inserted, flash the image to the microSD device with
```
# if you're flashing on a secondary device
$ xzcat <path to ...installer.img.xz> | sudo dd of=/dev/<microSD card device name> status=progress
# if you're flashing on the PinePhone
$ xzcat <path to ...installer.img.xz> | sudo dd of=/dev/<microSD card device name> status=noxfer
```
  Wait for dd to finish.
3. Double check with lsblk whether the microSD card device has some new pmOS partitions.
Switch off the PinePhone. Insert the microSD card into the PinePhone’s microSD slot in case it was not there yet. Boot the phone again.
Walk through the instructions of the graphical installer. Once the installer is done, switch off the phone, remove the microSD card from the phone (in case you selected to flash to the eMMC - the phone’s integrated storage device - during the graphical installer process), and start the phone again.
Verify that the new postmarketOS version is installed by opening the “Settings” app and going to “Details > About > OS Name”. You should see something along the lines of “postmarketOS v21.03.x”.
Wipe the microSD card by connecting it to a GNU/Linux device and running:
```
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<microSD card device name>
```

Closing thoughts

Big kudos to the postmarketOS project. They are doing difficult, yet very important work driven by a laudible motivation:

We are sick of not receiving updates shortly after buying new phones. Sick of the walled gardens deeply integrated into Android and iOS. That’s why we are developing a sustainable, privacy and security focused free software mobile OS that is modeled after traditional Linux distributions. With privilege separation in mind. Let’s keep our devices useful and safe until they physically break!

The developers appreciate your donations and contributions!

It is the second beta release. ↩︎

Play Settlers of Catan on the internet

Fri, 14 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In an ever more globalized world where people become increasingly mobile, it is likely that you have friends whom you can’t meet easily because they live far away from you. At times you might not even be allowed to meet with people who live close by, as we’ve all experienced in the recent past …

Thanks to technological progress and the wide availability of the internet, however, it is very easy nowadays to chat or have (video) calls¹ to connect with people whom, for whatever reason, you can’t see in person.

But why not play “The Settlers of Catan” with your friends and family over the internet for a change?

Pioneers

Pioneers is a free software computer game modeled after the ever popular “The Settlers of Catan” board game. It employs a client-server architecture, where one game participant hosts the game, while everyone else joins him or her. The host has a little bit more work to do, but is rewarded by being able to set the rules of the game.

Installation

Regardless of whether you’re the host or a client, you will have to download and install Pioneers. You can either download it from their website or — as the game is packaged for most Linux distributions — install it from the official repositories via the command line or any graphical interface of your choice. On Debian-based distros² simply execute the following two commands on the Terminal:

$ sudo apt-get update
# you'll be asked for your user password
# just type it out (you won't see it) and hit Enter
$ sudo apt-get install pioneers

Setting up the host

If you’re not hosting the game, you can skip this section and jump here directly.

Start the Pioneers game. You should see a screen similar to this:

Choose your username freely.

Now, you have to decide whether you want to play over your local network (e.g. home wifi) or over the internet. If you choose to play over your local network, only computers connected to this local network will be able to join you.

Local network

To host a Pioneers game on the local network, click on Create Game. You should see a window similar to this:

Customize the game to your liking. Make sure to not tick Register server if you want to host the game locally. Once you’re done, take note which Server port is specified and click Start Server. This should lead you to the following screen:

This indicates that your server is up and running. Now all you have to do is wait for clients (other players and yourself) to join. For a guide on that, jump to the client section.

Internet

To host a Pioneers game on the internet, select the pioneers.game-host.org metaserver and hit Join Public Game. A window like the following should open up:

Click on New Remote Game. Another window should open and look similar to this one:

Now feel free to setup the game rules as you wish. Once you’re done, click Create.

You will be immediately redirected to a game board. Take a look at the Messages field and search for a message like this one:

xx:xx:xx New game server requested on pioneers.game-host.org port 5561

Take note of the port and share it with the people you want to play with. This will help them to identify the game they should connect to. And this they should do fairly quickly as the server automatically assigns computer players to the game after one minute.

Connecting to a hosted game

If you want to host a game, please refer to this section.

To join a hosted Pioneers game, please start a Pioneers client. You should see a window closely resembling this:

By now, your host should have told you

whether the game is played on the local network or on the internet,
which port it is hosted on, and
if the game is played on the internet, on which metaserver it is hosted.

Local network

If the Pioneers game is hosted on the local network, your Pioneers client should automatically detect it:

If the box next to the Avahi text is not greyed out, select the item from the dropdown menu which ends with :<port number your host has told you>, and hit Join. Continue here.
If the box is greyed out, ask your host whether his Pioneers server is running already.

Internet

Select the Metaserver which your host has chosen for you and click on Join Public Game. A new window similar to this one should open up:

Select the game with the same port as the one your host has provided you with and click Join.

Enjoy the game!

Congratulations! You’re ready to play Settlers of Catan on your local network or over the internet!

Every connected player should see a screen somewhat like this one now:

Don’t worry if the map looks different - that’s something every player can change in his/her personal settings. Hopefully, you’ll also have more players connected than just one (compare the Player summary).

From here on the game is fairly self-explanatory (especially if you know the original board game): In the bottom left, each player is being told what he or she has to do. In this case, I am Waiting for my turn. Just try to coast along with what the game tells you³.

If you find yourself in a situation where you don’t know what to do, please consult the Pioneers player’s manual.

Other than that, have fun!

Please avoid proprietary apps for doing so. ↩︎
Raspbian works as well, in case you want to play from a RaspberryPi. ↩︎
One hint I am going to give away to those who read footnotes: the Legend which you can find under the Game menu entry is very helpful. ↩︎

Privacy in a digital world

Thu, 08 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Privacy — why?

Many people dismiss the need for privacy by claiming that they “have nothing to hide”. Let’s have a closer look at this statement and figure out why it is so ignorant and dangerous.

First of all, it is objectively wrong. Everyone has something to hide. Next time someone tells you he or she has “nothing to hide” ask them for their bank statements, their emails, and their instant messages of the last three years. When asked for such personal information, most people instinctively value privacy and are careful with whom they share this kind of sensitive information.

Second, it is logically flawed. The nothing-to-hide attitude is based on the presumption that everything hidden or worth hiding is criminal or wrong:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. - Eric Schmidt, CEO Google, 2009

A classic fallacy of composition: Just because shady activities typically happen in secret, doesn’t mean that everything non-public is obnoxious. As I’ve argued in the previous paragraph, even completely innocent and law abiding citizens will keep certain things private.

Third, and most consequential, the nothing-to-hide attitude leads to others having power over you. Having personal knowledge about you as a person gives others all kinds of possibilities to coerce you into doing what they want:

convincing you with more effective arguments (least malevolent)
manipulating you by exploiting your biases and weaknesses (malevolent)
blackmail and extort you with private information (really malevolent)

In either of these cases, you give up (some of) your freedom when forfeiting privacy.

Exactly this relation between privacy and freedom is my main point: Because privacy is a precondition for personal freedom it is so important for an open, democratic society of free individuals. Therefore, constant, omnipresent, privacy invading surveillance is a huge threat to an open society of free people.

Privacy under attack

Unfortunately, many governments and a lot of companies undermine privacy these days.

What can we do about it?

There are a lot of things each and everyone of us can do to preserve some of his – and other people’s – privacy. Each of the following advices will increase the amount of privacy you enjoy and might have a positive impact on other people’s privacy, too.

Pay in cash & refrain from customer cards!

When RAND researchers in 1971 were tasked with devising an unobtrusive yet complete surveillance scheme which the KGB would like to see implemented in the Soviet Union, they came up with an electronic transfer system¹: digital payment records are simply an extremely powerful surveillance tool.

50 years later, credit card payments, debit card transactions, and mobile payments are ubiquitous. Of course, all of them are tracked and analyzed. And one’s payment behavior is very revealing: e.g. income level, budget allocation, daily schedule and habits (payments are associated with timestamps and very often location data) can be easily derived.

Only thing worse than digital means of payment are customer/loyalty cards. Because of the much more granular data about your behavior, the infringement of your privacy is much more serious and the conclusions drawn about you are much more personal: like e.g. price sensitivities, your rate of consumption and preferences about individual goods.

Avoid all of that by paying in cash. Also, by using cash yourself you enable others to use cash: in some countries, digital payment is already so pervasive that businesses cede to accept cash payments completely. We have to avoid this situation for as long as there is no practical means of digital payment which respects your privacy².

Avoid data-driven companies!

Do not use services or products by companies whose business model is to mine your most personal data and sell those as raw material or in form of predictions to others. Remember: If you’re not paying for a business service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

The most obvious companies to mention here are Google and Facebook, but also Amazon, Apple and Microsoft (this list is by no means exhaustive). These companies (or any data-driven business) will never respect your privacy, as it is either opposed to the core of their business logic (Google and Facebook) or their business interests (the others).
Use Free and Open Source Software!

Luckily, there is plenty of privacy respecting software around (see my guides at the end of this article for a good overview of privacy respecting software)!

A precondition for your privacy being respected, is that the software is released under a free software license.

A software being free (NOT to be confused with gratis) means that the software developers grant you the rights to
- use,
- study,
- share and
- improve
that particular software as you seem fit. A technical requirement for these rights to be realized is that the source of the program is freely available.

Access to the source code is the only way a software can be reliably assessed on whether it respects your privacy. Without this access, you have to trust the developers of the software, to (a) not violate your privacy intentionally and (b) not have made mistakes which can be expoited by malicious third parties.

Therefore, whenever possible, replace proprietary programs on your computer with free software! Start with desktop applications, then proceed with the operating system, and lastly throw yourself at the firmware.
Encrypt!

The most effective technical tool to preserve your privacy in a digital world is encryption. Therefore, encrypt whenever possible! Encrypt your smartphone, encrypt your computer harddrive, encrypt your external harddrive, encrypt your emails, encrypt your instant messages, encrypt your different and strong passwords. Use a password manager to be able to leverage strong encryption with strong passwords everywhere without straining your memory.
Speak up!

However, using technology to protect our privacy will only help so much. Why? Because it means accepting a technological battle with companies and governments who will win this fight because of their superior resources in time, money and knowledge.

What really matters therefore, is that each and everyone of us speaks up for his and her inalienable right to privacy. We as citizens have to make it crystal-clear to decision makers in politics and business that we will not tolerate being snooped on constantly. That we value our freedom and our civil liberties and are absolutely not willing to give them up.

Additional resources

This post is only giving a brief overview of the importance of privacy, how it is under threat in an ever more digital age, and what each and everyone of us can do to preserve his and everyone else’s privacy.

Luckily, there is plenty of information on these topics out there in the internet and offline. Please refer to this evergrowing collection of resources for more information.

Paul Armer (1975), Computer Technology and Surveillance. Computers and People. Vol. 24 (9). See the archived version of this edition. ↩︎
GNU Taler might be a solution to that problem but its adoption is still very limited as of summer 2022. Their approach might be making headway in the EU though! ↩︎

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reading list

1. books

1.1. Fiction

1.1.1. Epic

Beowulf

AUTHOR:
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/anonymous/beowulf/john-lesslie-hall

FINISHED The Knight in the Panther's Skin
```
AUTHOR: Shota Rustaveli
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Georgian
READ_LANGUAGE: German
RATING: 3
```
An epic tale of chivalric sacrifice and disobedience towards authority in the name of friendship, honor and love.

1.1.2. Science Fiction

REREAD The Time Machine

AUTHOR: H. G. Wells
SOURCE: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35
PUBLISHED: 1895

The Fall of Hyperion
```
AUTHOR: Dan Simmons
PUBLISHED: 1990
```
(Sequel to Hyperion)
Hyperion
```
AUTHOR: Dan Simmons
PUBLISHED: 1989
```
Project Hail Mary
```
AUTHOR: Andy Weir
```

Bloodchild

AUTHOR: Octavia E. Butler
PUBLISHED: 1985

Ancillary Justice
```
AUTHOR: Ann Leckie
PUBLISHED: 2013
```

Snow Crash

AUTHOR: Neal Stephenson
PUBLISHED: 1992

The Word for World is Forest
```
AUTHOR: Ursula K. Le Guin
```

AUTHOR: Yevgeny Zamyatin
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
SOURCE: http://az.lib.ru/z/zamjatin_e_i/text_0050.shtml

China Mountain Zhang
```
AUTHOR: Maureen F. McHugh
```
The Will to Battle
```
AUTHOR: Ada Palmer
```
Murderbot
```
AUTHOR: Martha Wells
```

Cyberiad

AUTHOR: Stanisław Lem
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish

Rho

AUTHOR: E. S. Schmidt
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German

Galápagos
```
AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut
```
FINISHED I, Robot
```
AUTHOR: Isaac Asimov
RATING: 3
```
A collection of short stories describing the comical situations humans have gotten themselves into (and how they got out of them) by creating robots with "positronic" brains which always obey the following 3 rules:
1. "A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."
2. "A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders conflict with the First Law."
3. "A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws."
While I enjoyed the creative Sherlock-Holmes-like deduction puzzles the stories pose and found it entertaining how the robots end up ridiculing humans (e.g. the religious fanatic, or the people-pleasing liar), the characters in the (admittedly short, but interwoven) stories are not fully developed and the language is somewhat uninspiring.
FINISHED The Big Time
```
AUTHOR: Fritz Leiber
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/fritz-leiber/the-big-time
RATING: 2
```
While the book builds on some interesting premises (Big Time vs Small Time and time travel incl. messing with it), I have found it utterly confusing because it introduces so many concepts without properly explaining them: Doppelgangers (split into Ghosts and Demons), Change Winds, the Void, Resurrection, Change Death, Inversion, etc. This made it difficult for me to enjoy the book and think things through.

The Futurological Congress

AUTHOR: Stanisław Lem
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish

The Left Hand of Darkness
```
AUTHOR: Ursula K. Le Guin
```
Cloud Atlas
```
AUTHOR: David Mitchell
```

Parable of the Sower

AUTHOR: Octavia E. Butler
PUBLISHED: 1993

The Last of the Masters
```
AUTHOR: Philip K. Dick
```

FINISHED The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

AUTHOR: Ursula K. Le Guin
SOURCE: https://libcom.org/article/dispossessed

Gateway
```
AUTHOR: Frederik Pohl
```
FINISHED The Marching Morons
```
AUTHOR: Cyril M. Kornbluth
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51233
RATING: 3
```
Brief novella about a man, Barlow, who is being brought out of hibernation from a back then experimental drug) after centuries and finds himself on the earth where the huge majority of the population has an "average IQ of 45" and life is being kept together by a very tiny elite of "normal" people who have to toll like "slaves" to provide the services the "morons" need. This entire situation (completely fictional as IQ despite being strongly heriditary shows a very strong reversion to the mean effect, just like height; otherwise the world would at some point only be populated by dwarfs and giants) is the result of uninhibited breeding among less gifted people while intelligent people decided less and less kids. The elite looks to Barlow to solve the population problem which threatens to bring the planet to the limit. Barlow, being a greedy, racist and selfish man without any moral fibre, proceeds to implement a "solution" to the problem after making incredible demands beforehand.

While the world the novella portrays is curious and the social commentary biting, the novel became increasingly disjointed to me with the end just kinda bolted on.

The Invisible Man

AUTHOR: H. G. Wells
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/h-g-wells/the-invisible-man

Roadside Picnic

AUTHOR: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian

Solaris

AUTHOR: Stanisław Lem
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
READ_LANGUAGE: German

Eight O'Clock in the Morning
```
AUTHOR: Ray Nelson
```

FINISHED 2 B R 0 2 B

AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21279
RATING: 4

FINISHED A Psalm for the Wild-Built
```
AUTHOR: Becky Chambers
RATING: 3
```
FINISHED Old Man's War
```
AUTHOR: John Scalzi
RATING: 4
```
Captivating and funny science-fiction tale which still manages to pose some serious questions.
The Wall
```
AUTHOR: John Lanchester
```
This Is How You Lose the Time War
```
AUTHOR: Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
```
Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars
```
AUTHOR: Daniel Pinkwater
```

Válka s Mloky

AUTHOR: Karel Čapek
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Czech

Starship Troopers
```
AUTHOR: Robert Heinlein
```
Player Piano
```
AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut
```
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
```
AUTHOR: Philip K. Dick
```
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
```
AUTHOR: Douglas Adams
```
Dune
```
AUTHOR: Frank Herbert
PUBLISHED: 1965
```
Neuromancer
```
AUTHOR: William Gibson
```
The City & the City
```
AUTHOR: China Miéville
```

1.1.3. Drama

Peer Gynt

PUBLISHED: 1867
AUTHOR: Henrik Ibsen
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Norwegian

Cassandra

AUTHOR: Lesya Ukrainka
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian

Timon of Athens

AUTHOR: William Shakespeare
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/timon-of-athens

FINISHED R.U.R.
```
AUTHOR: Karel Čapek
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/karel-capek/r-u-r/paul-selver_nigel-playfair
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Czech
READ_LANGUAGE: English
RATING: 4
```
I loved how the book criticizes (amongst other things like the desire to rule, demeaning women, mass control through nationalism, willingness of shareholders to sacrifice anything for profit) the dehumanizing and self-serving Silicon Valley belief in technological "progress" 100 years in advance:

The plot focuses on a small group of industrialists, who sell machines ("robots", the novel actually coined the English term) who, albeit having human shape, have "no soul", "no interest in life", "no enjoyments", "no passion", and are built solely to work and fulfill the wishes of their owners without complaint. While the group pretends that they produce robots because they desire for humanity to be free from the burden of work and find self-fulfillment, it becomes pretty clear, that they are simply acting out of self-interest: reordering the world such that all human workers are replaced by robots (regardless the fact that they anticipate violence in this process) would make them supremely rich and powerful.

While the premise of the plot is fascinating, I found certain elements of it, like the change-your-ways-ok-I-will-marry-you twist, nothing but awkward.

Top Dogs

AUTHOR: Urs Widmer
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German

The Physicists

AUTHOR: Friedrich Dürrenmatt
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German

FINISHED The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

AUTHOR: William Shakespeare
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27761
RATING: 4

FINISHED Life Is A Dream

AUTHOR: Pedro Calderón de la Barca
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6363
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Spanish
READ_LANGUAGE: English

Waiting for Godot
```
AUTHOR: Samuel Beckett
```

1.1.4. Historical fiction

Wolf Hall
```
AUTHOR: Hilary Mantel
```
The English Patient
```
AUTHOR: Michael Ondaatje
```
Wide Sargasso Sea
```
AUTHOR: Jean Rhys
```
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
```
AUTHOR: Siegfried Sassoon
```

Foucault's Pendulum

AUTHOR: Umberto Eco
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian

FINISHED Beloved
```
AUTHOR: Toni Morrison
```

Khatyn

AUTHOR: Ales Adamovich
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Belarusian

The Empusium
```
AUTHOR: Olga Tokarczuk
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
```
[Read after Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg]
The Killer Angels
```
AUTHOR: Michael Shaara
```

The Jungle

AUTHOR: Upton Sinclair
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/upton-sinclair/the-jungle

FINISHED The Underground Railroad
```
AUTHOR: Colson Whitehead
RATING: 3
```
A good book elaborating on the horrors of slavery - be it on the plantations, on the run, or "in safety". I didn't understand why Whitehead decided to make the Underground Railroad a physical thing though and felt like this is a fairly grave stylistic and storytelling error: the book does not gain anything by it. Overall, I think, Beloved is the significantly better book, because it is so much more harrowing.

Life and Fate

AUTHOR: Vasily Grossman
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian

Maria

AUTHOR: Ulas Samchuk
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian

The Yellow Prince

AUTHOR: Vasyl Barka
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian

FINISHED Tango of Death
```
AUTHOR: Yuri Vynnychuk
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
READ_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
RATING: 4
```
A stunning and entertaining novel describing humanity in all its tragic and beautiful dimensions. Full of allusions to historical events (the Tragedy pid Bazarom, the Nazi invasion of Poland, the Soviet invasion of Poland, the Katyn massacre, the NKVD prisoner massacres, and the name giving Tango of Death), the book gives an incredibly vivid description of multi-cultural interwar Lviv (how historically accurate it is I cannot really assess) before the Second World War, the Holocaust and Soviet population settlement policies homogenized the population of Lviv - thereby irrevocably destroying a unique and truly European flair the city must have had for a long time. Somewhat similar to Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita the book features magical elements and a book-in-book approach, which connects the storyline from interwar Lviv to the storyline in modern-day Lviv in independent Ukraine.
FINISHED Lincoln in the Bardo
```
AUTHOR: George Saunders
RATING: 3
```
Stylistically interesting book which I had trouble understanding though. Taking the premature death of Willie Lincoln as the main theme, it describes the life stories of wildly different characters who are "tarrying" in the Bardo and their earthly and bardoesk struggles.

Because the novel is told alternatingly by the many different characters themselves in dialogues or monologues, in often slangy or broken English (depending on the age and social status of the person), and jumps between locations (here, the Bardo, and there, their lived lifes) and times, it is occassionally difficult to follow though. At times, I also felt like my English was not good enough, to fully understand what was being said.

I particularly liked the reflections of Abraham Lincoln on his son's death and how the same mortifying grief was felt all over the country embroiled in a bloody Civil War with him as the President. I was also looking forward to finding out about the fate of the Reverend, who lingered in the Bardo because he would have been sent to Hell but couldn't understand why - unfortunately, the novel leaves that open.

With Fire and Sword

AUTHOR: Henryk Sienkiewicz
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish

Atonement
```
AUTHOR: Ian McEwan
```
Radetzkymarsch
```
AUTHOR: Joseph Roth
```

The Books of Jacob

AUTHOR: Olga Tokarczuk
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish

FINISHED Glory
```
AUTHOR: NoViolet Bulawayo
RATING: 3
```
A novel taking the coup against freedom-fighter-turned-dictator Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe in 2017 as the historic background to describe the life of oppressors and oppressed in the fictitious Jadada. The novel shines when describing the emotional landscape of oppressed people and the trauma caused by the atrocities commited in the Gukurahundi. However, I did not get the choice on why all character are (domesticated) animals: While Orwell's Animal Farm describes the processes one could observe in Zimbabwe in the aftermath to the Second Chimurenga very well, the political process/environment in Glory is much more akin to the process of "inheriting" extractive institutions Acemoglu and Robinson describe in Why Nations Fail.
The Prince and the Coyote
```
AUTHOR: David Bowles
```
Everything is Illuminated
```
AUTHOR: Jonathan Safran Foer
```

FINISHED Data Tutashkhia

AUTHOR: Chabua Amirejibi
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Georgian
READ_LANGUAGE: German
RATING: 4

Paradise
```
AUTHOR: Abdulrazak Gurnah
```
Blood Meridian
```
AUTHOR: Cormac McCarthy
```
FINISHED East of Eden
```
AUTHOR: John Steinbeck
```
Gravity's Rainbow
```
AUTHOR: Thomas Pynchon
```

1.1.5. Psychological novel

Ungebetene Gäste

AUTHOR: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Hebrew

FINISHED No Longer Human

AUTHOR: Osamu Dazai
READ_LANGUAGE: English
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Japanese

FINISHED Hunger
```
AUTHOR: Knut Hamsun
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Norwegian
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60728
```
Read it a while ago, but remember how well the novel portrayed the protagonist's beliefs causing his self-destructive behavior, ultimately leading to moral, physical and psychological decay.

1.1.6. Comedy / Satire

Erewhon

AUTHOR: Samuel Butler
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-butler/erewhon
PUBLISHED: 1872

Gargantua and Pantagruel

AUTHOR: François Rabelais
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
READ_LANGUAGE: English
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1200

FINISHED Small Gods
```
AUTHOR: Terry Pratchett
RATING: 3
```
Hilarious, easy to read novel full of plot twists, satirizing gods (their vanity and selfishness), organized religion and the pro-forma "faith" it inspires. Hammers home the message that the power gods wield materialize through believers. And that not being too sure of one's own opinion is healthy - especially if one can laugh about it.

QualityLand

AUTHOR: Marc-Uwe Kling
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German

Orlando

AUTHOR: Virginia Woolf
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/virginia-woolf/orlando

The House of God
```
AUTHOR: Samuel Shem
```

Public and Private Life of Animals

AUTHOR: P. J. Stahl
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
READ_LANGUAGE: English
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/58214

Welcome to Lake Success
```
AUTHOR: Gary Shteyngart
```

Germany. A Winter's Tale

AUTHOR: Heinrich Heine
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6079

REREAD Animal Farm
```
AUTHOR: George Orwell
```

FINISHED Death and the Penguin

AUTHOR: Andrey Kurkov
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
READ_LANGUAGE: Russian
RATING: 3

FINISHED Absurdistan
```
AUTHOR: Gary Shteyngart
RATING: 2
```
Too long winded, occassionally witty tale about the insecure and aimless 325 pound son of a russian gangster oligarch. Against the backdrop of the ongoing war of russia against Ukraine, one of the more interesting aspects of the novel is the portrayal of the century old (starting with the Slavophiles) russian ressentiment for the West (and America as its most common representative).

1.1.7. Tragedy

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
```
AUTHOR: Ken Kesey
PUBLISHED: 1962
```

1.1.8. Crime

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
```
AUTHOR: Nicholas Meyer
```
The Power of the Dog
```
AUTHOR: Don Winslow
```
Ratking
```
AUTHOR: Michael Dibdin
```

1.1.9. Horror

FINISHED The Colour Out of Space
```
AUTHOR: Howard Phillips Lovecraft
SOURCE: https://fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20190920
RATING: 4
```
Captivating and scary short story about the evil force of an unknown alien entity coming onto earth on a meteorite.
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
```
AUTHOR: Howard Phillips Lovecraft
```

At the Mountains of Madness

AUTHOR: Howard Phillips Lovecraft
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/h-p-lovecraft/at-the-mountains-of-madness

REREAD The call of Cthulhu

AUTHOR: Howard Phillips Lovecraft
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68283

FINISHED The Nameless City

AUTHOR: Howard Phillips Lovecraft
SOURCE: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20130220
RATING: 2

An evocative story which, however, lacks an interesting story arc.

American Psycho
```
AUTHOR: Bret Easton Ellis
```

1.1.10. Thriller

The Talented Mr. Ripley
```
AUTHOR: Patricia Highsmith
```
Going Zero
```
AUTHOR: Anthony McCarten
```
A Most Wanted Man
```
AUTHOR: John le Carré
```

1.1.11. Bildungsroman

Jane Eyre

AUTHOR: Charlotte Brontë
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charlotte-bronte/jane-eyre

The Queen's Gambit
```
AUTHOR: Walter Tevis
```
The Catcher in the Rye
```
AUTHOR: J. D. Salinger
```

1.1.12. Uncategorized

FINISHED Island
```
AUTHOR: Aldous Huxley
SOURCE: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20180440
PUBLISHED: 1962
RATING: 5
```
Huxley uses (very eloquent) prose as a vehicle for a utopian sketch of society after his much more famous, nightmarish dystopia. The "plot" only serves as a background for the discussion of ideas. The novel, written at the end of Huxley's life, therefore integrates his ideas about politics, science and technology, reflections on philosophy and religion, and his psychedelic experiences into a coherent vision of what a good (according to Huxley) society might look like.

What's interesting to me, is how many of the issues to which Huxley describes solutions are problems which we still face, e.g.: Alienation from work, alienation from other human beings, escapism, consumerism, healthcare which focuses on treatment rather than prevention, tabooed mental health issues, concentration of power, militarism, religious and nationalistic fervor.

And while I don't agree with Huxley's Malthusian undertones and find some problems not sufficiently analyzed (e.g., the distribution of political power on Pala), the societal vision Huxley draws is absolutely fascinating: People being attentive of themselves and each other, a community which prioritizes self-realization, assigns at least as much (if not more) value to direct experience of the world than to "symbol manipulation", stresses that life is primarily relationships to other living beings, puts happiness before "economic efficiency", etc. To me, it is clearly preferable over the arrangement we currently find ourselves in. Unfortunately – and Huxley seems to have been keenly aware of this – his preferred societal arrangement is extremely fragile to outside intervention.

REREAD Brave New World

AUTHOR: Aldous Huxley
PUBLISHED: 1932
SOURCE: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20160545

The Pickwick Papers

AUTHOR: Charles Dickens
PUBLISHED: 1836
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles-dickens/the-pickwick-papers

The Woman Who Climbed Trees
```
AUTHOR: Smriti Ravindra
```
All Fours
```
AUTHOR: Miranda July
```
The Satanic Verses
```
AUTHOR: Salman Rushdie
```

Bhagavad Gita

AUTHOR: Vyasa
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Sanskrit
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/2388

Ramayana

AUTHOR: Valmiki
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Sanskrit
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/24869

Daughter

AUTHOR: Tamara Duda
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
PUBLISHED: 2019

Père Goriot

AUTHOR: Honoré de Balzac
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
PUBLISHED: 1835
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/honore-de-balzac/father-goriot/ellen-marriage

The Savage Detectives

AUTHOR: Roberto Bolaño
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Spanish
PUBLISHED: 1998

The City of the Sun

AUTHOR: Tommaso Campanella
PUBLISHED: 1602
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
READ_LANGUAGE: English
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/2816

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

AUTHOR: Ursula K. Le Guin
PUBLISHED: 1973

The Library of Babel

AUTHOR: Jose Luis Borges
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Spanish

Satantango

AUTHOR: László Krasznahorkai
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Hungarian

Halbinsel

AUTHOR: Kristine Bilkau
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German

Russische Spezialitäten

AUTHOR: Dmitrij Kapitelmann
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German

FINISHED A Farewell to Arms
```
AUTHOR: Ernest Hemingway
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ernest-hemingway/a-farewell-to-arms
RATING: 4
```
The novel describes how an American lieutenant and British nurse enter an affair during WWI on the Italian front. Despite Hemingway's signature paratactical, no-frills writing style, the book is evocative: the characters, their concerns, and the things happening to them are palpable. Quite unlike the "relationship" Henry and Catherine enter which I interpreted as an escape from the butchery surrounding them. Both characters try to keep up a kitschy romantic illusion of a relationship ("marriage") where the partners dissolve as individuals in a union.
Rebecca
```
AUTHOR: Daphne du Maurier
```
The Penelopiad
```
AUTHOR: Margaret Atwood
```
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072
```
AUTHOR: M. E. O'Brien, Eman Abdelhadi
```
The Door in the Wall
```
AUTHOR: H. G. Wells
```
The People in the Trees
```
AUTHOR: Hanya Yanagihara
```
A Little Life
```
AUTHOR: Hanya Yanagihara
```

The Royal Game

AUTHOR: Stefan Zweig
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

AUTHOR: Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian

A Woman

AUTHOR: Sibilla Aleramo
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian

Fahrenheit 451
```
AUTHOR: Ray Bradbury
```

The Glass Bead Game

AUTHOR: Hermann Hesse
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German

A Fable
```
AUTHOR: William Faulkner
```

Nagareru

AUTHOR: Aya Kōda
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Japanese

Morphine

AUTHOR: Szczepan Twardoch
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish

Null

AUTHOR: Szczepan Twardoch
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish

Adventures in Immediate Irreality

AUTHOR: Max Blecher
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Romanian

Scarred Hearts

AUTHOR: Max Blecher
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Romanian

The Painted Bird
```
AUTHOR: Jerzy Kosiński
```

The Well of Loneliness

AUTHOR: Radclyffe Hall
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/radclyffe-hall/the-well-of-loneliness

FINISHED The Elementary Particles

AUTHOR: Michel Houellebecq
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
READ_LANGUAGE: English

FINISHED The Castle
```
AUTHOR: Franz Kafka
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://static.zeno.org/ebooks/Kafka,_Franz_-_Das_Schloss_-_Zeno.org_ISBN_9783843023993.epub
```
Despite being unfinished, Kafka creates an intriguing study of the nature of authority in his novel: The masters in the castle exert their influence solely through the meaning the villagers assign them. Otherwise the administration is simply an inefficient, error-prone, convoluted and unaccountable paperpushing machine. But the villagers try to find meaning in everything the castle representatives do, adapt their behavior accordingly, and influence others in their behavior. And K., as a foreigner caught in his own web of lies, obviously cannot get why people behave this way as he lacks an understanding of the norms the villagers have internalized to such an extent that they are oblivious to the dysfunctionality of the system.

While it is easy to interpret the novel as to how helpless an individual can become if caught in an unyielding bureaucracy where they don't fit the pattern (very applicable to LLM support hell), the more fundamental reading of the novel to me is that our authorities are all socially constructed (intersubjective reality) and reinforce each other through other peoples' thinking and acting - which then obviously leads to the question whether we as a society also exhibit erratic and hard to justify behavior, i.e. what is our castle?
Lila: An Inquiry into Morals
```
AUTHOR: Robert M. Pirsig
```
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
```
AUTHOR: Robert M. Pirsig
```
FINISHED The Remains of the Day
```
AUTHOR: Kazuo Ishiguro
RATING: 4
```
Very nicely written book about an aging butler who, by reminiscing about the past on a roadtrip, sets off on his way to the painful realization that his twisted logic that dignity lies in being a literally "self"less servant in "distinguished" households is a lie. Unable to navigate emotional relationships with other humans he repeatedly flees to a professional interaction as this is what he is familiar with. Ends up idolizing his profession to such an extent that he loses personhood in the process.
Ecotopia
```
AUTHOR: Ernest Callenbach
```
Demons
```
AUTHOR: Fyodor Dostoevsky
```
FINISHED Pale Fire
```
AUTHOR: Vladimir Nabokov
RATING: 2
```
A hard to read (due to structure and used language) novel consisting of a poem and commentary on it by a deranged and completely self-centered, unreliable narrator. While the novel is comically funny at times because the narrator is so socially inept (thinking of him and Shade as friends, his creepy stalking) and him constantly warping reality to his own benefit, I found it a tiring read: in addition to the challenging language and unusual structure, I found the self-importance of the narrator combined with the banality of his story hard to bear.

The Ursitory

AUTHOR: Matéo Maximoff
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French

The Monkey Wrench Gang
```
AUTHOR: Edward Abbey
```
FINISHED One Hundred Years of Solitude
```
AUTHOR: Gabriel García Márquez
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Spanish
READ_LANGUAGE: English
RATING: 4
```
(I've read the English Rabassa translation as that is the one Márquez himself has praised.)

A book touching on some many things: the decay of a family over multiple generations, the mental states of atomized individuals, the human relationship with time, and the destructive influence hierarchical organization and boundless commerce has on societies.

Full of insane but intriguing characters who continue to surprise the reader with their actions/choices in all kinds of unexpected situations, the novel weaves tragedy in comedy in a very unique and (to me) appealing way.
Trainspotting
```
AUTHOR: Irvine Welsh
```

Uncle Tom's Cabin

AUTHOR: Harriet Beecher Stowe
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/harriet-beecher-stowe/uncle-toms-cabin

Women
```
AUTHOR: Charles Bukowski
```
Ham on Rye
```
AUTHOR: Charles Bukowski
```
Post Office
```
AUTHOR: Charles Bukowski
```
Neighbors
```
AUTHOR: Diane Oliver
```

FINISHED Journey to the End of the Night

AUTHOR: Louis-Ferdinand Céline
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
READ_LANGUAGE: German

Diary of a Drug Fiend
```
AUTHOR: Aleister Crowley
```

The Meursault Investigation

AUTHOR: Kamel Daoud
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French

Im Schloß

AUTHOR: Theodor Storm
SOURCE: https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Im_Schlo%C3%9F
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German

Immensee

AUTHOR: Theodor Storm
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/6651

The Rider on the White Horse

AUTHOR: Theodor Storm
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/74008

The Nickel Boys
```
AUTHOR: Colson Whitehead
```

The Trial

AUTHOR: Franz Kafka
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German

Prins Charles känsla

AUTHOR: Liv Strömquist
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Swedish

Dr. Leonardo’s Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with his Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta
```
AUTHOR: Maik Yohansen
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
```

Don Quixote

AUTHOR: Miguel de Cervantes
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Spanish
READ_LANGUAGE: English
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/miguel-de-cervantes-saavedra/don-quixote/john-ormsby

Tiger Trappers

AUTHOR: Ivan Bahrianyi
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
READ_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian

REREAD 1984
```
AUTHOR: George Orwell
```
FINISHED The Master and Margarita
```
AUTHOR: Mikhail Bulgakov
RATING: 4
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
READ_LANGUAGE: Russian
```
An extremely rich book weaving the topics of unconditional love, religion, insanity, magic, responsibility and guilt, and critique of Soviet society (e.g. the snobishness within cultural circles, pervasive fear of the secret police, and greed in a socialist society) in a highly sophisticated form.
Lolita
```
AUTHOR: Vladimir Nabokov
```
Fight Club
```
AUTHOR: Chuck Palahniuk
```
Wrong Way
```
AUTHOR: Joanne McNeil
```
Poor Things
```
AUTHOR: Alasdair Gray
```

My Struggle

AUTHOR: Karl Ove Knausgård
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Norwegian

American Street
```
AUTHOR: Ibi Zoboi
```
American Pastoral
```
AUTHOR: Philip Roth
```
Dying Animal
```
AUTHOR: Philip Roth
```

Serenade for Nadia

AUTHOR: Ömer Zülfü Livanelioğlu
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Turkish

Invisible Cities

AUTHOR: Italo Calvino
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian

FINISHED The Leopard
```
AUTHOR: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
READ_LANGUAGE: German
RATING: 3
```
A historical novel centered on the Duke of Salina and his family during the time of the Risorgimento. It's a magniloquent study of the aristocratic society and the changes it undergoes. The novel's throughout ironic undertone - most strongly expressed in Tancredi's fascinating sentence that "everything has to change to stay the same" - makes it a pleasure to read; even if one tends to dislike the depicted society (with its religious hypocrisy, the economic inequality and feudal structure) itself. I also found the character of the Duke likeable: especially his lamentations about death and preoccupation with stars/eternity. But I never warmed up to the rest of the novel as the content felt very mundane to me. Maybe that's partially the point though.

Dom Casmurro

AUTHOR: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Portuguese

The Green Berets
```
AUTHOR: Robin Moore
```
In Cold Blood
```
AUTHOR: Truman Capote
```

Die Elixiere des Teufels

AUTHOR: E. T. A. Hoffmann
SOURCE: http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Hoffmann,+E.+T.+A./Romane/Die+Elixiere+des+Teufels

FINISHED Steppenwolf
```
AUTHOR: Hermann Hesse
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/75802
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
RATING: 5
```
Powerful book which spoke to me like no other recently.

The protagonist Harry Haller, an aging man, comes to see himself as a dual being with an animalistic, raw, untamed side (the Steppenwolf) and a highly sophisticated, cultured and intellectual one. He finds himself lonely and totally unfit for life in the nationalistic and bourgeois society which surrounds him. Although he despises that lifestyle in his mind, he has to admit to himself that he outwardly resembles his contemporaries in his own behavior. The very vivid inner conflict between his striving for ideals and the actual baseness of his life brings Haller on the verge of suicide.

He then gets to know a woman, who (tries to) introduce him to a more accepting, joyful, humorous view on life.

The book is superbly written and offers an intriguing depiction of a very rich emotional inner life.
Der schwarze Obelisk
```
AUTHOR: Erich Maria Remarque
```
Drei Kameraden
```
AUTHOR: Erich Maria Remarque
```
The Bonfire of the Vanities
```
AUTHOR: Tom Wolfe
```
Der Zauberberg
```
AUTHOR: Thomas Mann
```
Tropic of Cancer
```
AUTHOR: Henry Miller
```
CANC Présence de la mort
```
AUTHOR: Charles Ferdinand Ramuz
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
READ_LANGUAGE: German
```
The novel has a very interesting premise of the Earth falling into the sun and how people react to it, but I found it neigh unreadable.
REREAD Slaughterhouse-Five
```
AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut
```

The Passion According to G.H.

AUTHOR: Clarice Lispector
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Portuguese

FINISHED Mrs. Dalloway

AUTHOR: Virginia Woolf
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/virginia-woolf/mrs-dalloway

Piranesi
```
AUTHOR: Susanna Clarke
```
All the Pretty Horses
```
AUTHOR: Cormac McCarthy
```
The Vegetarian
```
AUTHOR: Han Kang
```
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
```
AUTHOR: Hunter S. Thompson
```
House of Leaves
```
AUTHOR: Mark Z. Danielewski
```
The Road
```
AUTHOR: Cormac McCarthy
```
Infinite Jest
```
AUTHOR: David Foster Wallace
```

The Tartar Steppe

AUTHOR: Dino Buzzati
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian

1.2. Non-Fiction

1.2.1. Psychology

The Principles of Psychology
```
AUTHOR: William James
PUBLISHED: 1890
```
What Is Thought?
```
AUTHOR: Eric B. Baum
PUBLISHED: 2003
```
Sparse Distributed Memory
```
AUTHOR: Pentti Kanerva
PUBLISHED: 1988
```

REREAD Thinking, Fast and Slow

AUTHOR: Daniel Kahneman
PUBLISHED: 2011

READING The Analysis of Mind

AUTHOR: Bertrand Russell
PUBLISHED: 1921
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2529

The Psychology of Espionage

AUTHOR: Ursula M. Wilder
SOURCE: https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/psychology-of-espionage.pdf

REREAD How Emotions Are Made
```
AUTHOR: Lisa Feldman Barrett
```
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
```
AUTHOR: Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi
```

Dream and Existence

AUTHOR: Ludwig Binswanger
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German

Basic Forms and Knowledge of Human Existence

AUTHOR: Ludwig Binswanger
READ_LANGUAGE: German
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German

Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History
```
AUTHOR: Norman O. Brown
```
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
```
AUTHOR: Dave Grossman
```
The Design of Everyday Things
```
AUTHOR: Donald Norman
```
Atomic Habits
```
AUTHOR: James Clear
```
Selfless: The Social Creation of "You"
```
AUTHOR: Brian Lowery
```
Solve for Happy
```
AUTHOR: Mo Gawdat
```
The Denial of Death
```
AUTHOR: Ernest Becker
```
Man and His Symbols
```
AUTHOR: Carl Gustav Jung
```
FINISHED Humor, Seriously: Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life
```
AUTHOR: Jennifer Aaker, Naomi Bagdonas
```
Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth
```
AUTHOR: Brad Blanton
```
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
```
AUTHOR: Gabor Maté, Daniel Maté
```
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
```
AUTHOR: Bessel van der Kolk
```
Your Erroneous Zones
```
AUTHOR: Wayne W. Dyer
```
No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model
```
AUTHOR: Richard C. Schwartz
```

1.2.2. Business

Who Moved My Cheese?
```
AUTHOR: Spencer Johnson
```
FINISHED Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
```
AUTHOR: Oliver Burkeman
RATING: 3
```
Read this book earlier this year and remember that despite a sensible hypothesis (give up on achieving everything in one's finite time) and containing some useful advice on confronting finitude in everyday life (accept that decisions necessarily imply giving up on certain things; be aware and in the moment; serialize tasks whenever possible), I couldn't help but feel that the insights weren't particularly new: E.g. the stoics have had some of the exact same thoughts roundabout 2000 years before.
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
```
AUTHOR: Roger Fisher, William Ury, Bruce Patton
```
The Decision Book: Fifty Models for Strategic Thinking
```
AUTHOR: Mikael Krogerus, Roman Tschäppeler
```
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
```
AUTHOR: Cal Newport
```
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
```
AUTHOR: Cal Newport
```
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
```
AUTHOR: Clay Shirky
```

1.2.3. Complexity

Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
```
AUTHOR: Mitchell Waldrop
```
At Home in the Universe
```
AUTHOR: Stuart A. Kauffman
```
Ubiquity
```
AUTHOR: Mark Buchanan
```

1.2.4. Programming

Computational Thinking

AUTHOR: Jeannette M. Wing
SOURCE: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1118178.1118215
PUBLISHED: 2006

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

AUTHOR: Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman
SOURCE: https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/books_pres_0/6515/sicp.zip/index.html

Computer Science: Do It Yourself Wiki

AUTHOR: Yinmin Zhong
SOURCE: https://csdiy.wiki/en/

Crafting Interpreters

AUTHOR: Robert Nystrom
SOURCE: https://craftinginterpreters.com/contents.html

Hacking: The Art of Exploitation
```
AUTHOR: Jon Erickson
```
The Secret Life of Programs: Understand Computers – Craft Better Code
```
AUTHOR: Jon Steinhart
```
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
```
AUTHOR: Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
```

The Little Schemer

AUTHOR: Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen

Implementation Patterns
```
AUTHOR: Kent Beck
```
FINISHED Getting Real
```
AUTHOR: 37 Signals LLC
SOURCE: https://basecamp.com/gettingreal
RATING: 4
```
Insightful and practical short booklet on how to build a sucessful web app. While I don't agree with some details, the strong focus on practicality, simplicity, minimalism and customer/user-orientation resonates well with me.

1.2.5. Political theory

Anarchy Works

AUTHOR: Peter Gelderloos
SOURCE: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works
PUBLISHED: 2010

Jeder Mensch

ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
AUTHOR: Ferdinand von Schirach
PUBLISHED: 2021

The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups
```
AUTHOR: Mancur Olson Jr.
PUBLISHED: 1965
```

Post-Scarcity Anarchism

AUTHOR: Murray Bookchin
PUBLISHED: 1971

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
```
AUTHOR: Naomi Klein
```
Politics and Morals
```
AUTHOR: Benedetto Croce
```

How Nonviolence Protects the State

AUTHOR: Peter Gelderloos
SOURCE: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state

Anarchy explained to children

AUTHOR: José Antonio Emmanuel
SOURCE: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jose-antonio-emmanuel-anarchy-explained-to-children

Anarchistische Ökologien

AUTHOR: Milo Probst
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.matthes-seitz-berlin.de/fs/OPENACCESS/probst_anarchistische-oekologien_oa.pdf

How to Spot a Fascist
```
AUTHOR: Umberto Eco
```
The Myth of the Strong Leader
```
AUTHOR: Archie Brown
```
Blackshirts & Reds
```
AUTHOR: Michael Parenti
```

READING Political Theory of Anarchism

AUTHOR: Jonathan Eibisch
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-7183-4/politische-theorie-des-anarchismus/

The Human Condition
```
AUTHOR: Hannah Arendt
```
The Quest for Cosmic Justice
```
AUTHOR: Thomas Sowell
```

Ethics: Origin and Development

AUTHOR: Peter Kropotkin
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian

Mutual Aid

AUTHOR: Peter Kropotkin
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/mutual-aid

The Origins of Totalitarianism
```
AUTHOR: Hannah Arendt
```
The Road to Serfdom
```
AUTHOR: Friedrich A. Hayek
```
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
```
AUTHOR: Benedict Anderson
```
What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
```
AUTHOR: Michael Joseph Sandel
```
Orientalism
```
AUTHOR: Edward Said
```

1.2.6. Economics

The Political Economy of Participatory Economics

AUTHOR: Michael Albert, Robin Hahnel
SOURCE: https://znetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/zbooks/htdocs/books/polpar.htm

Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty First Century

AUTHOR: Michael Albert, Robin Hahnel
SOURCE: https://znetwork.org/looking-forward/

Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
```
AUTHOR: Elinor Ostrom
```

The Wealth of Nations

AUTHOR: Adam Smith
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/adam-smith/the-wealth-of-nations

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How To Take It Back
```
AUTHOR: Oliver Bullough
```
FINISHED Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
```
AUTHOR: Yanis Varoufakis
PUBLISHED: 2023
```
The Intelligent Investor
```
AUTHOR: Benjamin Graham
```
Fractals and Scaling in Finance
```
AUTHOR: Benoit Mandelbrot
```

Trade Wars are Class Wars

AUTHOR: Matthew C. Klein, Michael Pettis

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
```
AUTHOR: Brett Scott
```
Der Wachstumszwang: Warum die Volkswirtschaft immer weiterwachsen muss, selbst wenn wir genug haben
```
AUTHOR: Mathias Binswanger
```
FINISHED Debt: The First 5000 Years
```
AUTHOR: David Graeber
```
Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back
```
AUTHOR: Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow
```
Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
```
AUTHOR: Kate Raworth
```
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
```
AUTHOR: Liaquat Ahamed
```
Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered
```
AUTHOR: Ernst F. Schumacher
```

FINISHED Good Economics for Hard Times

AUTHOR: Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

FINISHED Why Nations Fail

AUTHOR: Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Too Big to Fail: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street
```
AUTHOR: Andrew Ross Sorkin
```

1.2.7. Biology

The Wisdom of the Hive

AUTHOR: Thomas Dyer Seeley
PUBLISHED: 1995

Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life
```
AUTHOR: Martin Nowak
```
Blueprint
```
AUTHOR: Robert Plomin
```

1.2.8. History

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors
```
AUTHOR: James D. Hornfisher
```
Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook
```
AUTHOR: Mark Bray
```
Auschwitz
```
AUTHOR: Laurence Rees
```
The Volunteer
```
AUTHOR: Jack Fairweather
```
Berlin: The Downfall 1945
```
AUTHOR: Antony Beevor
```
Stalingrad
```
AUTHOR: Antony Beevor
```
Berlin Diary
```
AUTHOR: William L. Shirer
```
A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, death and defiance in Ukraine
```
AUTHOR: Andrew Harding
```
The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
```
AUTHOR: Serhii Plokhy
```
The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination
```
AUTHOR: Javier Cercas
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Spanish
```
Band of Brothers
```
AUTHOR: Stephen E. Ambrose
```

Das Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus

AUTHOR: Stéphane Courtois
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French

A People's History of the United States
```
AUTHOR: Howard Zinn
```
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young: la Drang - The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam
```
AUTHOR: Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway
```
Space Rogue: How the Hackers Known As L0pht Changed the World
```
AUTHOR: Cris Thomas
```
HOLD The Best and the Brightest
```
AUTHOR: David Halberstam
```
Red Famine
```
AUTHOR: Anne Applebaum
```
FINISHED On Tyranny
```
AUTHOR: Timothy Snyder
```
A very practically useful handbook on how citizens can sustain a healthy democracy inspired by lessons from the 20th century.

1.2.9. Mathematics

A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography
```
AUTHOR: Dan Boneh, Victor Shoup
```

Fractal Geometry

AUTHOR: Michael Frame, Benoit Mandelbrot, Nial Neger
SOURCE: https://gauss.math.yale.edu/public_html/People/frame/Fractals/

Statistics Done Wrong

AUTHOR: Alex Reinhart
SOURCE: https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
```
AUTHOR: Leonard Mlodinow
```
FINISHED How Not to Be Wrong
```
AUTHOR: Jordan Ellenberg
RATING: 4
```
Very nice book about how mathematical thinking can help structure everyday problems and decision making.

1.2.10. Causality

The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect
```
AUTHOR: Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie
```

1.2.11. (Auto-)Biography / Memoir

Desert Solitaire
```
AUTHOR: Edward Abbey
```
Homage to Catalonia
```
AUTHOR: George Orwell
```

L'Effondrement

AUTHOR: Édouard Louis
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

AUTHOR: Olaudah Equiano
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/olaudah-equiano/the-interesting-narrative-of-the-life-of-olaudah-equiano

The Girl in the Green Sweater

AUTHOR: Krystyna Chiger, Daniel Paisner

Between the World and Me
```
AUTHOR: Ta-Nehisi Coates
```
FINISHED Maus
```
AUTHOR: Art Spiegelman
```
A moving comic about the trauma and multi-generational guilt induced by the horrors of the Holocaust.

Physics and Beyond

AUTHOR: Werner Heisenberg
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German

The World of Yesterday

AUTHOR: Stefan Zweig
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German

The Pianist

AUTHOR: Władysław Szpilman
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish

Diary of an Invasion
```
AUTHOR: Andrey Kurkov
```
REREAD The Doors of Perception
```
AUTHOR: Aldous Huxley
```
A Tale of Love and Darkness
```
AUTHOR: Amos Oz
```

The African

AUTHOR: J. M. G. Le Clézio
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French

FINISHED Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography
```
AUTHOR: William Lee Miller
```
FINISHED Schützenhilfe
```
AUTHOR: Jonas Kratzenberg
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
```
Story of how a German Bundeswehr soldier feels the call of duty to use his skills to protect the Ukrainian people in the wake of Russia's full scale invasion in 2022. Details his experiences in the Armed Forces of Ukraine until his battlefield injury.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

AUTHOR: Ralph Leighton, Richard Feynman

The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity
```
AUTHOR: Mark Vonnegut
```
FINISHED Wittgensteins Neffe
```
AUTHOR: Thomas Bernhard
```

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

AUTHOR: Jean-Dominique Bauby
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French

A Surgeon's War
```
AUTHOR: Henry Ward Trueblood
```
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
```
AUTHOR: Thomas Edward Lawrence
```

Wind, Sand and Stars

AUTHOR: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French

The Short-Timers
```
AUTHOR: Gustav Hasford
```
FINISHED Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir
```
AUTHOR: Irvin D. Yalom
```
FINISHED A Loss
```
AUTHOR: Olesya Khromeychuk
```
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
```
AUTHOR: Ishmael Beah
```

1.2.12. Free Culture, Open Content and FLOSS

The Seven Rules of Trust
```
AUTHOR: Jimmy Wales
```

Digital Copyright

AUTHOR: Jessica Litman
SOURCE: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/maize/mpub9798641

Against Intellectual Monopoly

AUTHOR: Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine
SOURCE: http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm

Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All
```
AUTHOR: Peter Baldwin
```
Internet for the People
```
AUTHOR: Ben Tarnoff
```
The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle
```
AUTHOR: Peter Baldwin
```
Free Culture
```
AUTHOR: Lawrence Lessig
```
FINISHED Culture vs. Copyright
```
AUTHOR: Anatoly Volynets
SOURCE: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Culture_vs._Copyright
RATING: 3
```
Insightful analysis on the difference of culture (described as an inner dialogue in the creator as well as a dialogue with the audience) and civilization; in particular in the juxtaposition of cultural goods (whose value increases with more use) in comparison to material ones (whose value decreases with more utilization). While the analysis on copyright as an inhibitor of innovation and "the progress of science and useful arts" is convincingly laid out (e.g. I wasn't aware that the Statute of Anne, the precursor to the current copyright system, was instituted upon the request of publishers, not authors), the alleged economic superiority of the alternative options (self-tuning and authoright) for creators seems doubtful to me (unfortunately).
You Are Not a Gadget
```
AUTHOR: Jaron Lanier
```

1.2.13. Philosophy

Essays in Radical Empiricism

AUTHOR: William James
PUBLISHED: 1912
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32547

The Taming of Chance
```
AUTHOR: Ian Hacking
PUBLISHED: 1990
```
The Emergence of Probability
```
AUTHOR: Ian Hacking
PUBLISHED: 1975
```

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

AUTHOR: Ludwig Wittgenstein
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php/Logisch-philosophische_Abhandlung

Minima Moralia

AUTHOR: Theodor W. Adorno
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German

REREAD Meditations

AUTHOR: Marcus Aurelius
READ_LANGUAGE: English

Philosophy and Psychedelics

AUTHOR: Christine Hauskeller, Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes

The Mind's I

AUTHOR: Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel C. Dennett

Consciousness Explained
```
AUTHOR: Daniel C. Dennett
```
The Mystery of Consciousness
```
AUTHOR: John Searle
```
READING The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory
```
AUTHOR: David Chalmers
```

Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

AUTHOR: Arthur Schopenhauer
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47406

The World as Will and Representation

AUTHOR: Arthur Schopenhauer
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: http://www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Schopenhauer,+Arthur/Die+Welt+als+Wille+und+Vorstellung

The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self
```
AUTHOR: Thomas Metzinger
```

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

AUTHOR: Henry David Thoreau
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/71

FINISHED Walking
```
AUTHOR: Henry David Thoreau
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1022
```
Found this to be a very weird essay. It's a mixture of praise to the benefits of walking Thoreau experienced personally, interspersed with reflections on man's relationship to Nature as opposed to culture. While the latter contain some (mildly) interesting thoughts (importance of living in the moment, "Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.", servility of looking for laws to obey), the ideas that "wildness" is essential to life, that westward movement of men is an inevitability with a clear mission, and that Nature (rather than culture) is the source of intellectual and moral growth are not very convincing.
Reality
```
AUTHOR: Peter Kingsley
```

Philosophical Investigations

AUTHOR: Ludwig Wittgenstein
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php/Philosophische_Untersuchungen

HOLD Tao Te Ching

Author: Laozi
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Chinese
READ_LANGUAGE: English
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/laozi/tao-te-ching/james-legge

HOLD Thus Spoke Zarathustra

AUTHOR: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7205

Existentialism is a Humanism
```
AUTHOR: Jean-Paul Sartre
```
Sein und Zeit
```
AUTHOR: Martin Heidegger
```
The Myth of Sisyphus
```
AUTHOR: Albert Camus
```
The First and Last Freedom
```
AUTHOR: Jiddu Krishnamurti
```
How to Be an Existentialist
```
AUTHOR: Gary Cox
```
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
```
AUTHOR: Thomas Nagel
```

The Foundations of Science

AUTHOR: Henri Poincaré
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39713
READ_LANGUAGE: English

Beyond Freedom and Dignity
```
AUTHOR: Burrhus Frederic Skinner
```
On Bullshit
```
AUTHOR: Harry G. Frankfurt
```

1.2.14. Physics

The Feynman Lectures on Physics

AUTHOR: Richard Phillips Feynman
SOURCE: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

Quantum Computation and Quantum Information
```
AUTHOR: Michael Nielsen, Isaac Chuang
```
Candide and the Physicist
```
AUTHOR: Bernard d'Espagnat
```

1.2.15. Technology

Cult of the Dead Cow
```
AUTHOR: Joseph Menn
PUBLISHED: 2025
```

Internet, Mon Amour

AUTHOR: Agnese Trocchi
PUBLISHED: 2019
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian

Resisting AI
```
AUTHOR: Dan McQuillan
```
Tools for Conviviality
```
AUTHOR: Ivan Illich
```
Addiction by Design
```
AUTHOR: Natasha Dow Schüll
```
The Cultural Logic of Computation
```
AUTHOR: David Golumbia
```
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
```
AUTHOR: Karen Hao
```

Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence

AUTHOR: Elena Esposito
SOURCE: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5338/Artificial-CommunicationHow-Algorithms-Produce

Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace version 2

AUTHOR: Lawrence Lessig
SOURCE: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Code_v2.pdf

The AI Con
```
AUTHOR: Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna
```
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
```
AUTHOR: Steven Levy
```
Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
```
AUTHOR: Brian Merchant
```
Where Wizards Stay Up Late
```
AUTHOR: Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon
```
Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information
```
AUTHOR: Sarah Lamdan
```
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
```
AUTHOR: Cathy O'Neil
```
Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
```
AUTHOR: Kate Crawford
```
New Dark Age:Technology and the End of the Future
```
AUTHOR: James Bridle
```

1.2.16. Sociology

An Essay on the Principle of Population

AUTHOR: Thomas Robert Malthus
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/4239

Digital Authoritarianism in the Making

AUTHOR: Françoise Daucé, Benjamin Loveluck, Francesca Musiani
SOURCE: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/6043/Digital-Authoritarianism-in-the-MakingRepression
PUBLISHED: 2025

Pleasure Activism

AUTHOR: adrienne maree brown
PUBLISHED: 2019

Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know
```
AUTHOR: Erica Chenoweth
```
Growing Up Absurd
```
AUTHOR: Paul Goodman
```

Madness and Civilization

AUTHOR: Michel Foucault
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French

The Utopia of Rules
```
AUTHOR: David Graeber
```
Cowardice: A Brief History
```
AUTHOR: Chris Walsh
```
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
```
AUTHOR: Anand Giridharadas
```

1.2.17. Medicine / Health

FINISHED Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
```
AUTHOR: James Nestor
```
Despite sometimes making very hard to believe claims, the book highlights how important breathing is for us humans and how one can benefit from doing it correctly. After reading the book I have become much more attentive to my own breathing and make an active effort to avoid mouth breathing at all costs (incl. taping my mouth shut overnight).
Why We Die
```
AUTHOR: Venki Ramakrishnan
```
Sleep: Change the way you sleep with this 90 minute read
```
AUTHOR: Nick Littlehales
```
The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity
```
AUTHOR: Norman Doidge
```
In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration
```
AUTHOR: Shane O'Mara
```
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
```
AUTHOR: Matthew Walker
```
Am Leben bleiben. Ein Onkologe bekämpft seinen Krebs.
```
AUTHOR: Wolfram Gössling
```
Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
```
AUTHOR: Lisa Feldman Barrett
```

1.2.18. Science

Towards Convivial Sciences: Uniting Strands of Critical Inquiry

AUTHOR: Ephraim Pörtner, Tamara Lebrecht, Critical Scientists Switzerland
SOURCE: https://www.oekom.de/buch/towards-convivial-sciences-9783987261664

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
```
AUTHOR: Michael Nielsen
```
Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives
```
AUTHOR: P. Kyle Stanford
```
Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth
```
AUTHOR: Stuart J. Ritchie
```
Conversations with a Mathematician: Math, Art, Science and the Limits of Reason
```
AUTHOR: Gregory J. Chaitin
```

1.2.19. Religion

Bardo Thodol or The Tibetan Book of the Dead

AUTHOR: Karma Lingpa
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Tibetan

1.2.20. Environment

Industrial Society and Its Future
```
AUTHOR: Ted Kaczynski
```
Fire Weather
```
AUTHOR: John Vaillant
```

Silent Spring

AUTHOR: Rachel Carson
SOURCE: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20151002

1.2.21. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents

AUTHOR: David L. Poole, Alan K. Mackworth
SOURCE: https://artint.info/

Neural Networks and Deep Learning

AUTHOR: Michael Nielsen
SOURCE: http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/

Deep Learning

AUTHOR: Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville
SOURCE: https://www.deeplearningbook.org/

1.2.22. Uncategorized

Summa Technologiae

AUTHOR: Stanisław Lem
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
PUBLISHED: 1964

Attensity!

AUTHOR: The Friends of Attention
PUBLISHED: 2026

bolo'bolo
```
AUTHOR: Hans Widmer
PUBLISHED: 1983
```
Cities for a Single Planet
```
AUTHOR: Hans Widmer
PUBLISHED: 2025
```
Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul
```
AUTHOR: Giulio Tononi
PUBLISHED: 2012
```

Kritik der Kompetenz

AUTHOR: Andreas Gelhard
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German

Revolting Librarians
```
AUTHOR:
```

Crisis Engineering

AUTHOR: Marina Nitze, Matthew Weaver, Mikey Dickerson

A Guide for the Perplexed
```
AUTHOR: Ernst F. Schumacher
```
The Checklist Manifesto
```
AUTHOR: Atul Gawande
```
Against Interpretation
```
AUTHOR: Susan Sontag
```
Deschooling Society
```
AUTHOR: Ivan Illich
```
Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar
```
AUTHOR: David Graeber
```

Women and War

AUTHOR: Aurélie Bros
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian

The Art of War

AUTHOR: Sun Tzu
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/sun-tzu/the-art-of-war/lionel-giles
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Chinese
READ_LANGUAGE: English

A Burst of Light
```
AUTHOR: Audre Lorde
```
Steal this book
```
AUTHOR: Abbie Hoffman
```
SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed
```
AUTHOR: Martin Nowak
```
Trust Me, I'm Lying
```
AUTHOR: Ryan Holiday
```
The Elephant and the Blind
```
AUTHOR: Thomas Metzinger
```
How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us
```
AUTHOR: Lucy Bernholz
```

Gomorrah

AUTHOR: Roberto Saviano
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
```
AUTHOR: Julian Jaynes
```
The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead
```
AUTHOR: Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert
```
Gleich geht die Geschichte weiter, wir atmen nur aus: Essays
```
AUTHOR: Tanja Maljartschuk
```
The Revolution Will be Digitised: Dispatches from the Information War
```
AUTHOR: Heather Brooke
```
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
```
AUTHOR: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
```
Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World
```
AUTHOR: Carl T. Bergstrom, Jevin D. West
```
Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another
```
AUTHOR: Philip Ball
```
Programming & Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory & Experiments
```
AUTHOR: John C. Lilly
```
Be Here Now
```
AUTHOR: Ram Dass
```
What's Our Problem?: A Self-Helf Book for Societies
```
AUTHOR: Tim Urban
```

Humankind: A Hopeful History

AUTHOR: Rutger Bregman
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Dutch
READ_LANGUAGE: English

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
```
AUTHOR: Daniel Levitin
```
What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell
```
AUTHOR: Erwin Schrödinger
```
Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well
```
AUTHOR: Amy Edmondson
```
Wanting
```
AUTHOR: Luke Burgis
```
Why Most Things Fail
```
AUTHOR: Paul Ormerod
```
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
```
AUTHOR: Douglas Hofstadter
```
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
```
AUTHOR: James Gleick
```
An Immense World
```
AUTHOR: Ed Yong
```

2. papers

2.1. Philosophy

Minds, Brains, and Programs

AUTHOR: John Searle
SOURCE: https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/searle.minds.brains.programs.bbs.1980.pdf

What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
```
AUTHOR: Thomas Nagel
```

Philosophy of AI

AUTHOR: Vincent C. Müller
SOURCE: https://philpapers.org/archive/MLLPOA.pdf

Morality and Art

AUTHOR: Philippa Foot
SOURCE: https://philarchive.org/go.pl?id=FOOMAA-2&proxyId=&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FFOOMAA-2.pdf

2.2. Computer Science

Attention Is All You Need

AUTHOR: Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin
SOURCE: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/3f5ee243547dee91fbd053c1c4a845aa-Paper.pdf
PUBLISHED: 2017

No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering
```
AUTHOR: Fred Brooks
PUBLISHED: 1986
```
Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System
```
AUTHOR: Leslie Lamport
PUBLISHED: 1978
```

Go To Statement Considered Harmful

AUTHOR: Edsger W. Dijkstra
PUBLISHED: 1968

Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine
```
AUTHOR: John McCarthy
PUBLISHED: 1960
```

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

AUTHOR: Sergey Brin, Larry Page
PUBLISHED: 1998
SOURCE: https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/Brin98Anatomy.pdf

Information Management: A Proposal

AUTHOR: Tim Berners-Lee
PUBLISHED: 1989
SOURCE: https://cds.cern.ch/record/369245/files/dd-89-001.pdf

A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication

AUTHOR: Vinton G. Cerf, Robert E. Kahn
SOURCE: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos561/papers/cerf74.pdf
PUBLISHED: 1974

The Complexity of Theorem-Proving Procedures

AUTHOR: Stephen A. Cook
SOURCE: https://www.inf.unibz.it/~calvanese/teaching/14-15-tc/material/cook-1971-NP-completeness-of-SAT.pdf
PUBLISHED: 1971

A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks

AUTHOR: Edgar F. Codd
SOURCE: https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem

AUTHOR: Alan Turing
SOURCE: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf

A Mathematical Theory of Communication

AUTHOR: Claude E. Shannon
SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/19980715013250/http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf

Reflections on Trusting Trust

AUTHOR: Ken Thompson
SOURCE: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf

2.3. Physics

Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation
```
AUTHOR: Freeman J. Dyson
```

2.4. Complexity

FINISHED More is Different
```
AUTHOR: Philip Warren Anderson
SOURCE: https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_different_PWA.pdf
```
In one of the very first papers to approach the problem of "emergence", nobel prize winning physicist Philip Warren Anderson describes why accepting reductionism ("the ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws") as a fundamental scientific hypothesis "does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe". Anderson argues that increasing scale will lead to unforeseen properties and behaviors on the higher level which warrants separate and dedicated scientific study. In particular, he puts forward "the theory of 'broken symmetry'" to explain "phase transitions" which cause a "shift from quantitative to qualitative differentiation". In Anderson's view these qualitative shifts warrant scientific inquiry on every level and not just on the level of fundamental laws.

Finally, Anderson ends with a (purportedly historic) dialogue illustrating how quantitative differences (can) lead to qualitative differences in economics:

Fitzgerald: "The rich are different from us."

Hemingway: "Yes, they have more money."

2.5. Mathematics

Mathematical Creation

AUTHOR: Henri Poincaré
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
READ_LANGUAGE: English
SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/20210923031615/https://henripoincarepapers.univ-nantes.fr/framepdf.php?url=http://henripoincarepapers.univ-nantes.fr/chp/hp-pdf/hp1910moa.pdf

2.6. Anthropology

2.7. Economics

Ostrom's Law: Property Rights in the Commons

AUTHOR: Lee Anne Fennell
SOURCE: https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.18352/ijc.252

The Allocation of Food to Food Banks

AUTHOR: Canice Prendergast
SOURCE: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/11.1-Prendergast-food4-model.pdf

2.8. Neuroscience

A Framework for Intelligence and Cortical Function Based on Grid Cells in the Neocortex

AUTHOR: Jeff Hawkins, Marcus Lewis, Mirko Klukas, Scott Purdy, Subutai Ahmad
SOURCE: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neural-circuits/articles/10.3389/fncir.2018.00121/full

2.9. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity

AUTHOR: Parshin Shojaee, Iman Mirzadeh, Keivan Alizadeh, Maxwell Horton, Samy Bengio, Mehrdad Farajtabar
SOURCE: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06941

Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models

AUTHOR: Andy Zou, Zifan Wang, Nicholas Carlini, Milad Nasr, J. Zico Kolter, Matt Fredrikson
SOURCE: https://llm-attacks.org/

Computing Machinery and Intelligence

AUTHOR: Alan Turing
PUBLISHED: 1950
SOURCE: https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf

FINISHED ChatGPT is bullshit
```
AUTHOR: Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries, Joe Slater
SOURCE: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5.pdf
```
The authors argue in this well-structured article that LLMs like ChatGPT qualify as bullshitters (or bullshit machines) as described Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit because of their utter indifference for truth. Therefore, the authors deem bullshit to be a more accurate description for LLM output than the widely accepted but more forgiving lingo of hallucinations/confabulations.

Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary

AUTHOR: Dmitry Kobak, Rita González-Márquez, Emőke-Ágnes Horvát, Jan Lause
SOURCE: https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.adt3813

2.10. Uncategorized

Epistemic Vigilance

AUTHOR: Dan Sperber
SOURCE: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2010.01394.x

From honeybees to Internet servers: biomimicry for distributed management of Internet hosting centers

AUTHOR: Sunil Nakrani, Craig Tovey
SOURCE: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-3182/2/4/S07

The Environmental Paradox of Bicycling

AUTHOR: Karl T. Ulrich
SOURCE: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1335210
PUBLISHED: 2006

The economic and environmental sustainability of digital commons: Lessons from the 2023 Debian project survey

AUTHOR: Mathieu O’Neil, Sébastien Broca, Xiaolan Cai, Angela Daly, Cecilia Rikap, Sébastien Shulz, Stefano Zacchiroli
SOURCE: https://dcpc.info/publications/the-economic-and-environmental-sustainability-of-digital-commons-lessons-from-the-2023-debian-project-survey/

The Science of Visual Data Communication: What Works

AUTHOR: Steven L. Franconeri, Lace M. Padilla, Priti Shah, Jeffrey M. Zacks, Jessica Hullman
SOURCE: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10.1177/15291006211051956

No Community Can Do Everything: Why People Participate in Similar Online Communities

AUTHOR: Nathan TeBlunthuis, Charles Kiene, Isabella Brown, Laura (Alia) Levi, Nicole McGinnis, and Benjamin MakoHill
SOURCE: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3512908
PUBLISHED: 2022

Do Artifacts Have Politics?

AUTHOR: Langdon Winner
SOURCE: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652
PUBLISHED: 1980

FINISHED How Much Technology Is Needed to Build a Smart Community Space?
```
AUTHOR: Panayotis Antoniadis
SOURCE: https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2025/12/11285919/2ckeXT1Fngs
PUBLISHED: 2025
```
The paper raises a few important points for the conceptualization of "smart" cities (or local communities more generally) with respect to technology:
1. The socializing aspect of human interactions cannot be replaced by machines.
2. Analog friction might be desired when it leads to meaningful interactions.
3. People must be able to choose to use technology as much as is necessary, not as much as possible. This implies that using less technology is an option, too.
4. Effective choice of technological solutions is only possible if people can assess the workings, data flows and requirements/dependencies of the technology in question.
It showcases how context-aware organizational and technological choices help run a successful, centrally-located community space in Zurich.

The Banality of "Ethnic War"

AUTHOR: John Mueller
SOURCE: https://politicalscience.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/is2000.pdf

3. other

3.1. essays

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

AUTHOR: Bogna Konior
SOURCE: https://flugschriften.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/flugschriften-6-bogna-konior-the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-v.2.pdf

Existential Technologies

AUTHOR: Bogna Konior
SOURCE: https://existentialtech.antikythera.org/

FINISHED Science, Liberty and Peace
```
AUTHOR: Aldous Huxley
PUBLISHED: 1946
SOURCE: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20150551
```
Huxley discusses the role of science (and scientists) and technology (and technologists) in the ever increasing power in the hands of few, the exploited & manipulated position workers find themselves in, blind belief in inevitable progress used to defend all kinds of injustices in the present, the dangers of nationalism, the role of war, and frailty of arms control. He also sketches out alternative ways forward into a better future: more personal moral responsibility, decentralisation, self-reliance, and non-violent protest.

Who Goes Nazi?

AUTHOR: Dorothy Thompson
SOURCE: https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/

The Californian Ideology

AUTHOR: Richard Barbrook, Andy Cameron
PUBLISHED: 1995
SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/20061109180733/http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-californianideology.html

Nine Things I Learned in Ninety Years

AUTHOR: Edward Packard
SOURCE: https://edwardpackard.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Nine-Things-I-Learned-In-Ninety-Years.pdf

A Short Rebuttal to Searle

AUTHOR: Nils John Nilsson
PUBLISHED: 1984
SOURCE: https://ai.stanford.edu/~nilsson/OnlinePubs-Nils/General%20Essays/OtherEssays-Nils/searle.pdf

Meditation on Obedience and Liberty

AUTHOR: Simone Weil
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
PUBLISHED: 1940

The Power of Words

AUTHOR: Simone Weil
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
PUBLISHED: 1937

Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie

AUTHOR: Rosa Luxemburg
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
PUBLISHED: 1916

Review of Adolph Hitler's "Mein Kampf"

AUTHOR: George Orwell
SOURCE: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks16/1600051h.html

Fascinating Fascism

AUTHOR: Susan Sontag
SOURCE: https://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/classes/33d/33dTexts/SontagFascinFascism75.htm

Ur-Fascism

AUTHOR: Umberto Eco
SOURCE: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism

The Promised LAN

AUTHOR: Paul Tagliamonte
SOURCE: https://notes.pault.ag/tpl/

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

AUTHOR: Ursula K. Le Guin
SOURCE: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/mirror/u/uk/ursula-k-le-guin-the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction.pdf

FINISHED This World of Ours
```
AUTHOR: James Mickens
SOURCE: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
```
A (sarcastic) plea for cryptographers to appreciate everyday scenarios and constraints.

The Night Watch

AUTHOR: James Mickens
SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/20150212021416/http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thenightwatch.pdf

FINISHED The Slow Winter
```
AUTHOR: James Mickens
SOURCE: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/theslowwinter.pdf
```
Hilarious short story about the pitfalls of CPU design and the ridiculousness of optimization beyond a certain point - especially when they come at the price of incredible complexity.
FINISHED Review of 1984
```
AUTHOR: Isaac Asimov
SOURCE: https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
```
A scathing review of Orwell's 1984: Asimov sees the book as a unimaginative, personal vendetta with Stalinism, rather than a work of science fiction denouncing totalitarianism. In his opinion, Orwell stays too close to the technological level of the 1940s, comes up with unrealistic setups in the world of 1984 (institutionalized hate events, perpetual war and rewriting of history [historically not necessary], or total denunciation and control [how would that work?]), and completely leaves non-Stalinist totalitarians out of the picture.

Resisting the Techno-Fascist Takeover: Are We Ready for Decomputing?

AUTHOR: Dan McQuillan
SOURCE: https://berlinergazette.de/resisting-the-techno-fascist-takeover-are-we-ready-for-decomputing/

The Psychology of Political Violence

AUTHOR: Emma Goldman
SOURCE: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-psychology-of-political-violence

A Cypherpunk's Manifesto

AUTHOR: Eric Hughes
SOURCE: https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html

What is Philosophy of Science good for?

AUTHOR: Massimo Pigliucci
SOURCE: https://philosophynow.org/issues/44/What_is_Philosophy_of_Science_Good_For

Die Rackets und der Geist

AUTHOR: Max Horkheimer
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German

On the Shortness of Life

AUTHOR: Seneca the Younger
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/seneca/dialogues/aubrey-stewart
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Latin
READ_LANGUAGE: English

Self-Reliance

AUTHOR: Ralph Waldo Emerson
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ralph-waldo-emerson/essays/text/self-reliance

A Room of One's Own
```
AUTHOR: Virginia Woolf
```

The Nooscope Manifested

AUTHOR: Vladan Joler, Matteo Pasquinelli
SOURCE: https://fritz.ai/nooscope/

On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

AUTHOR: Edsger W. Dijkstra
SOURCE: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

AUTHOR: Jo Freeman
SOURCE: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

BITCH Manifesto

AUTHOR: Jo Freeman
SOURCE: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/bitch.htm

Life Without Law

AUTHOR: Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness

The Abolition of Work

AUTHOR: Bob Black
SOURCE: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work

Why Socialism?

AUTHOR: Albert Einstein
SOURCE: https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/

Bethink Yourselves!

AUTHOR: Leo Tolstoy
SOURCE: https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B4%D1%83%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%B9%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%8C_(%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B9)
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
READ_LANGUAGE: Russian

Politics as a Vocation

AUTHOR: Max Weber
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Politik_als_Beruf
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German

FINISHED Politics and the English Language
```
AUTHOR: George Orwell
SOURCE: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20180223
RATING: 4
```
In this essay, Orwell diagnoses a tendency "away from concreteness" in modern prose which eliminates meaning and thereby prevents clear thinking. "Political language", in particular, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." A lack of clarity in one's words turns language into an instrument "for concealing or preventing" rather than "expressing" thought. As a guide for one's own writing (and thinking), Orwell gives the following six rules to express oneself clearly:
1. "Never use a methaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."
2. "Never use a long word where a short one will do."
3. "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out."
4. "Never use the passive where you can use the active."
5. "Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word, if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."
6. "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous."
While these rules serve as handy guidelines, most importantly Orwell encourages us "to let the meaning choose the word" in a very conscious process:

[I]t is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person.

3.2. speeches

Two Concepts of Liberty

AUTHOR: Isaiah Berlin
SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/20240127190748/https://cactus.utahtech.edu/green/B_Readings/I_Berlin%20Two%20Concpets%20of%20Liberty.pdf

FINISHED Cargo Cult Science
```
AUTHOR: Richard Feynman
SOURCE: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
```
In the 1974 Caltech commencement speach Feynman pleads scientists to adhere to basic scientific integrity by raising all kinds of doubts about their own experimental results. He brings up issues persisting til today (lack of reproduced results, academic/financial/political pressures) but argues that by disregarding scientific integrity, scientists are fooling themselves and leaving the realm of science.

The Ultimate Revolution

AUTHOR: Aldous Huxley
SOURCE: https://www.organism.earth/library/document/ultimate-revolution

3.3. (news) articles

Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy
```
AUTHOR: Jen Caltrider, Misha Rykov, Zoë MacDonald
```
FINISHED How easy is it to fudge your scientific rank
```
AUTHOR: Christie Wilcox
```
Illustrates how (easily) metrics can be gamed, in this case the h-index (as measured by Google Scholar) in the scientific community: Citation mills will boost that rating for money, or you can just implement their modus operandi yourself.
Notes on the Original Affluent Society
```
AUTHOR: Marshall Sahlins
```

Seeking the Magic Mushroom

AUTHOR: R. Gordon Wasson
SOURCE: https://bibliography.maps.org/bibliography/default/resource/15048

A New Theory of the Universe

AUTHOR: Robert Lanza
SOURCE: https://theamericanscholar.org/a-new-theory-of-the-universe/

The Economy of Ideas

AUTHOR: John Perry Barlow
SOURCE: https://www.wired.com/1994/03/economy-ideas/

3.4. blog posts

3.4.1. Programming

How To Become A Hacker

AUTHOR: Eric Steven Raymond
SOURCE: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

Epigrams in Programming

AUTHOR: Alan J. Perlis
SOURCE: https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

FINISHED Why Rewriting Emacs is Hard
```
AUTHOR: Kana
SOURCE: https://kyo.iroiro.party/en/posts/why-rewriting-emacs-is-hard/
```
Describes some intricacies of Emacs string handling which Emacs rewrites have to take care of.

How To Write Unmaintainable Code

AUTHOR: Roedy Green
SOURCE: https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code/blob/master/README.md

Worse is Better is Worse

AUTHOR: Richard P. Gabriel
SOURCE: https://dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf

The Rise of Worse is Better

AUTHOR: Richard P. Gabriel
SOURCE: https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

FINISHED -2000 Lines Of Code
```
AUTHOR: Andy Hertzfeld
SOURCE: https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
```
A nice story illustrating how bad of a metric LOC are for productivity for software devs.
The Grug Brained Developer
```
SOURCE: https://grugbrain.dev
```

How to conduct an effective code review

AUTHOR: Otto Kekäläinen
SOURCE: https://optimizedbyotto.com/post/how-to-code-review/

Debian source packages in git explained

AUTHOR: Otto Kekäläinen
SOURCE: https://optimizedbyotto.com/post/debian-source-package-git/

Creating Debian packages from upstream Git

AUTHOR: Otto Kekäläinen
SOURCE: https://optimizedbyotto.com/post/debian-packaging-from-git/

Permacomputing

AUTHOR: viznut
SOURCE: http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing.html

Permacomputing update 2021

AUTHOR: viznut
SOURCE: http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing_update_2021.html

3.4.2. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science

Decision Trees: The unreasonable power of nested decision rules

AUTHOR: Jared Wilber, Lucía Santamaría
SOURCE: https://mlu-explain.github.io/decision-tree/

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks

AUTHOR: Andrej Karpathy
SOURCE: https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

The AI-collapse pre-mortem

AUTHOR: Bert Hubert
SOURCE: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/an-ai-premortem/

FINISHED Lies, Damn Lies, and LLM Output
```
AUTHOR: Christophe Pettus
```
LLMs don’t know what is “true,” just what they’ve read.

[…] We as an industry (and as a society) are setting ourselves for failure by relying on the intelligence of something that can’t think and can’t check its work.

The Bitter Lesson

AUTHOR: Richard S. Sutton
SOURCE: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

I Think I’m Done Thinking About genAI For Now

AUTHOR: Glyph
SOURCE: https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html

3.4.3. Anarchism

Anarchism as a Way of Life

AUTHOR: Zoe Baker
SOURCE: https://anarchozoe.com/2021/09/25/anarchism-as-a-way-of-life/

Anarchists Are Not Naive About Human Nature

AUTHOR: Zoe Baker
SOURCE: https://anarchozoe.com/2022/02/28/anarchists-are-not-naive-about-human-nature/

3.4.4. Other

Augmenting Long-Term Memory

AUTHOR: Michael Nielsen
SOURCE: https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

The Internet of Consent

AUTHOR: Anil Dash
SOURCE: https://www.anildash.com/2025/05/27/internet-of-consent/

The Grug Brained Designer
```
AUTHOR:
SOURCE: https://www.grug.design/know
```
[The analogue to The Grug Brained Developer for designers.]

Action is sometimes clearer than talk: Why we will always need trade

AUTHOR: William Gillis
SOURCE: https://humaniterations.net/2020/09/05/action-is-sometimes-clearer-than-talk

Deep in Mordor where the shadows lie: Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google

AUTHOR: elilla
SOURCE: https://wordsmith.social/elilla/deep-in-mordor-where-the-shadows-lie-dystopian-stories-of-my-time-as-a-googler

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I am a European fighting for a dignified life in the digital age.

I want to live in a world where each individual can maintain their privacy and the people as a collective are in control of their digital infrastructure.

Feel free to have a look at my reading list.

You can give me public feedback (questions, ideas, rebuttals) on my blog by sending a plain text email to this mailing list.

For more private discussions, you can write me an email (PGP) or XMPP message, or interact with me on the Fediverse.

Resources

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is a collection of resources which I recommend you to check out on the topics of freedom, privacy, technology, and free software.

Organizations

	description	language
digitalcourage	German association advocating for civil rights and privacy in Germany and the EU.	German
noyb	Austrian association “closing the gap between law and the reality by collectively enforcing [privacy] rights”.	multilingual
epicenter.works	Austrian association “fighting against surveillance and for a right to privacy”.	German
Digitale Gesellschaft CH	Swiss association advocating for civil and consumer rights in the digital age.	multilingual
Bits of Freedom	Dutch organization fighting for privacy and freedom of communication.	Dutch
FSF	“The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom”.	multilingual
FSFE	“Free Software Foundation Europe is a charity that empowers users to control technology”.	multilingual
Software Freedom Conservancy	“Software Freedom Conservancy is a nonprofit organization centered around ethical technology. Our mission is to ensure the right to repair, improve and reinstall software.”	English
Chaos Computer Club	“The Chaos Computer Club e. V. (CCC) is Europe’s largest association of hackers.”	multilingual
Internet Archive	“The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. "	English
Software Heritage	An initiative to “build the universal software archive”.	multilingual
disroot	“Disroot is a platform providing online services based on principles of freedom, privacy, federation and decentralization.”	multilingual
Simply Secure	“Our work focuses on building technology that enhances and protects human dignity by centering the needs of vulnerable populations.”	English
Calyx Institute	“Our mission is to educate the public about privacy in digital communications and to develop tools that anyone can use.”	English
The Citizen Lab	An “interdisciplinary laboratory […] focusing on research, development, and high-level strategic policy and legal engagement at the intersection of information and communication technologies, human rights, and global security.”	English
Open Technology Fund	An “independent non-profit organization committed to advancing global Internet freedom”.	English
Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland	German association fighting for free access to knowledge and democratic participation. Is behind successful projects like the Prototype Fund or FragDenStaat.	German
Sovereign Tech Fund	German government funded organization which “supports the development, improvement and maintenance of open digital infrastructure. Our goal is to sustainably strengthen the open source ecosystem.”	multilingual
NLNet Foundation	Dutch foundation with the goal “to promote the exchange of electronic information and all that is related or beneficial to that purpose”.	English

Initiatives

	description	language
Reclaim your face!	European initiative to ban biometric mass surveillance in the European Union.	multilingual
Privacy Guides	Lists tools and services to protect yourself against global mass surveillance.	multilingual
prism-break	Tools to “opt-out of global data surveillance programs”.	multilingual
REUSE software	“We make [software] licensing easy for humans and machines alike.”	English

Blogs

	description	language
Drew DeVault’s blog	personal blog on FOSS, technology, and Drew’s political views	English
Michał Woźniak’s blog	personal blog on “information security, privacy in the digital age, Internet governance (including censorship, surveillance, Net Neutrality), copyright reform, digital media literacy”	multilingual
Mike Kuketz’ blog	blog focusing on IT security and privacy topics	German

Specific blog posts

	description	language
(Mis)conceptions about the impact of surveillance	blog post on the impact of surveillance on behavior	English
Android Privacy Guide: Zero Trust	blog post on how to preserve your privacy on an Android phone	English
Why not GitHub? & Give Up GitHub!	blog posts on why you should avoid GitHub for FLOSS projects	English

Books

1984 by George Orwell
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

Scientific articles

“Private traits and attributes are predictable from records of human behavior” by Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel
“Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use” by Jonathon W. Penney

Quotes

“We kill people based on metadata.” — former director of NSA and CIA, General Michael Hayden

puer robustus

My Google Summer of Code '25 at Debian

Reviews and summaries revisited

Book review: A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Reviews and summaries

Reading freely

Setting up my Pinebook Pro

Working on my blog

On blockchain based crypto tokens

WhatsApp und die Domestizierung von Nutzern

Reverse tethering with Android

Dodging Digital Colonialism

Citizen Science with BOINC

Librebooting a ThinkPad T400

PinePhone postmarketOS upgrade

Play Settlers of Catan on the internet

Privacy in a digital world

Reading list

Table of Contents

1. books

1.1. Fiction

1.1.1. Epic

1.1.2. Science Fiction

1.1.3. Drama

1.1.4. Historical fiction

1.1.5. Psychological novel

1.1.6. Comedy / Satire

1.1.7. Tragedy

1.1.8. Crime

1.1.9. Horror

1.1.10. Thriller

1.1.11. Bildungsroman

1.1.12. Uncategorized

1.2. Non-Fiction

1.2.1. Psychology

1.2.2. Business

1.2.3. Complexity

1.2.4. Programming

1.2.5. Political theory

1.2.6. Economics

1.2.7. Biology

1.2.8. History

1.2.9. Mathematics

1.2.10. Causality

1.2.11. (Auto-)Biography / Memoir

1.2.12. Free Culture, Open Content and FLOSS

1.2.13. Philosophy

1.2.14. Physics

1.2.15. Technology