Re: Debian MiniConf @ LCA2010 in Wellington — help needed
On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 07:43:34AM +0200, Fabio Tranchitella wrote: Hello, * 2009-06-16 15:28, martin f krafft wrote: Is there anyone ready to organise the MiniConf, alone or in a team? Are you going to be at LCA2010 anyway, or would this be your chance of going? If a team is formed to organize the miniconf, I'm willing to help. I don't have the expertise to do it all by myself, though. It's really easy to find people to talk at mini-conf once LCA has started or is about to start - there's just that many DDs who attend. It's much harder to get someone to commit to something early enough that you can get it included within the programs. A lot of people will also want to see the sysadmin miniconf, and the DB miniconfs, specially people who are being sent by their work. Pasc -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Help: Need of list stats for Debian-Med mailing list (fwd)
On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 09:21:25AM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote: Hi it seems impossible to reach a real person when posting to listmaster or listarchive - I just get automated responses. I also wrote Pascal Hakim in private because I know he is one of the listmasters but got no response. Is there anybody who knows a reasonable way to get the list stats I need (see below)? If not I need to work out my alternate plan which is more time consuming than I would like this to be. 'lo, Are the graphs on: http://lists.debian.org/stats/ enough for historical data? This should at least get you started. I won't have time to look into the 2008 data for a bit but one of the other listmasters might. Cheers, Pasc -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Filibustering general resolutions
On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 10:09:04AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: Hi, Due to a loop hole in the constitution, any group of 6 Debian developers can delay any general resolution indefinitely by putting up their own amendment, and every 6 days, making substantiative changes in their amendment (they can just rotate between a small number of very different proposals). Previously, I had stated that I, in my role as secretary, would set an deadline for proposals two weeks in the future, and any proposals past the deadline would go no a separate ballot, in order to break the filibuster, even though the constitution did not specifically permit that. I realize now that that would be a an egregious abuse of the powers of the secretary, censorship, and grievously wrong procedure. I am no longer willing to step in and break filibusters. The project should decide how it wants to handle filibustering, if it feels like doing anything about it, of course. But now, any GR has a veto contingent of only 6 developers. If a group of developers started filibustering a GR over and over again, the DAMs would be well within their rights to pull the accounts of the people in question. A denial of service attack is grounds for exclusion and DMUP states: Don't by any ... reckless ... act interfere with the work of another developer Regards, Pasc -- Pascal Hakim+61 403 411 672 Do Not Bend -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: uol.com.br and petsupermarket
On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 08:23 +1100, Anand Kumria wrote: On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 02:12:12PM -0600, Matthew R. Dempsky wrote: On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 02:19:55PM +1100, Anand Kumria wrote: That means that as of now, uol.com.br are now considered spam addresses and anyone with that address (uol.com.br) has now been unceremoniously unsubscribed[1]. I am still receiving those obnoxious messages in response to my posts to debian-user. Thanks for the information Matthew, that narrows it down to 475 candidate addresses. However we never anticipated that unsubscribing uol.com.br subscribers would rectify the problem -- esepecially immediately. You're assuming that it's someone subscribed with the same address to debian-devel and debian-user. Cheers, Pasc -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: mailbox clogging, need daily digests of the list
On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 04:49 +0530, Madana Prathap wrote: On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 03:12:42 +0530, Paul Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tuesday 17 January 2006 13:33, Madana Prathap wrote: I've been subscribed to 12 debian mailing-lists. As you could imagine, my mailbox is simply over-flowing now, with the number of mails the frequency. To avoid the struggle, I would like to subscribe to a daily digest of mails on the lists. I imagine having to only worry about checking after the digests have been sent reduces the odds of an embarassingly small mailbox from clogging. As my from: indicates, Gmail doesn't exactly suffer from a lack of space as such. What I did mean by clogging, is visual - a few hundred list mails a day, are enough to make your inbox look messy. Heh. The 2005 list archives are 780 Mb (gziped) Also, I sent mail to the list-bot with help and all I got, was instructions how to subscribe or unsubscribe. The Debian Listmaster did inform me though, that digest-mode is offered only for the high-traffic lists. Thank you! :) Hence this thread could be considered closed. PS: Many more lists are now getting a lot of traffic, the situation has probably changed since the time when lists were reviewed to identify the high-traffic ones. If these did get officially recognized as high-traffic, then possibly my wish of digest-mode for them, would be fulfilled. The long term plan is to architect something that will use the lessons we've learnt over the last few years. That's still in the vapourware stage though. Cheers, Pasc -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Fwd: Problems contacting the debian people .... (was: new configuration to avoid spam at the lists)]
On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 10:19:22AM +0100, MJ Ray wrote: MarC [EMAIL PROTECTED] skribis: [...] Now I am writing this email to this list after being told by MJ Ray that debian-www@lists.debian.org wasn't appropiate. I have also explained why I think antispamming lists.debian.org is worse than useless. I didn't see that reply, but I agree that antispamming only in there would probably be useless (or make little difference). Please excuse me for cross posting but I would like to know why I'm having all this problems to contact the administrators of the lists. [...] Just how widespread is this problem? I know I've had several non-responses and Marco d'Itri has been reporting it too, and now it seems that users are being ignored. This makes debian look bad - if these delegates need more help answering email, have they asked for it? Are we getting to the point where there needs to be a Debian Enquiry Response Team? That said, would delegates answer forwarded enquiries? It would be even worse to send evasive replies while trying telepathy. I try very hard to reply[1] to all (valid) emails sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED] as well as [EMAIL PROTECTED] It's becoming more and more apparent that I'm missing some of the queries that are addressed there. I'm guessing some of those emails are managing to hit both mine and Cord's spam filters, or arriving when both of us are busy for a couple of days. Most requests are still taken care of however; you'll only hear about those that are not taken care of. Would a Debian Enquiry Response Team help? I'm not sure... Judging by the burnout we get in those sort of positions, I'm not sure that it would be that useful once the people silly enough to help have burnt out themselves. Cheers, Pasc (with his Listmasters are people too badge on) [1]: I have to admit that I don't reply to people asking for messages to be removed and/or altered on the listarchives. While the current stated list archives policy is we don't do that, ever, I don't quite agree with that. There's no real concensus on changing that policy, and I'm not willing to cause a Problems with Mr Hakim thread on debian-devel just quite yet. -- Pascal Hakim 0403 411 672 Do Not Bend -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Fwd: Problems contacting the debian people .... (was: new configuration to avoid spam at the lists)]
Hi, I've been a little busy in the last couple of weeks, and haven't had time to reply to this particular set of emails as it's more complicated than most requests. I will usually answer the easier requests first to get them out of the way. On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 11:07:52PM +0200, MarC wrote: Hello, Can anybody help me? In order to suggest a better (IMO) configuration for the mailing lists to avoid spam, I have sent several mails during my life to [EMAIL PROTECTED] according to this subject and I never got any answer. You have received some answers. At this point [EMAIL PROTECTED] just points to [EMAIL PROTECTED] However, some weeks ago, I was able to contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] and Pascal Hakim answered me (thank you!). See below the content of such mail... Then, I reported to the users of the debian-catalan-user list his answer and I did a poll to know their opinion about it which can be checked at the archives of the list (http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-catalan/2005/debian-user-catalan-200505/threads.html). But since I reported back the results (16-5-2005) nobody has answered me again... There are a few issues at play here. Firstly, I do not believe that this would actually help a huge amount. There are currently a few different other places where spammers can get those addresses. For example, most lists are currently replicated to NNTP services, where addresses are not obfuscated. I'm also convinced that there are spammer feeder bots subscribed to the lists. While I have no conclusive proof of this, both Anand and myself have seen strange behaviour that can probably only be explained by that. There's basically nothing that can be done about either of those. Secondly, there's a massive technical problem. A lot of things posted on lists are of a technical nature, and include at signs. Whether this is because they're stack traces, arch archive names, or perl arrays doesn't matter a great deal, you don't want those to be damaged. Finally, I'm not really willing to have this enabled for just one list. It's liable to cause even more problems in terms of administration. Finally we have realised that some spammers write directly to the list without being stopped by any moderator. I think we should also improve this. Do you think it's possible? See the english posts of http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-catalan/2005/debian-user-catalan-200505/threads.html I'm also not willing to add moderators to lists. Having moderators causes more problems than not having any. Cheers, Pasc (with his listmaster hat on) -- Pascal Hakim 0403 411 672 Do Not Bend -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Fwd: Problems contacting the debian people .... (was: new configuration to avoid spam at the lists)]
On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 06:41:53PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote: Pascal Hakim [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I try very hard to reply[1] to all (valid) emails sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED] as well as [EMAIL PROTECTED] It's becoming more and more apparent that I'm missing some of the queries that are addressed there. I'm guessing some of those emails are managing to hit both mine and Cord's spam filters, or arriving when both of us are busy for a couple of days. Do you review all listmaster@ mail (that is, a spam filter doesn't delete it, just tags it)? I encourage people who use spam filters on official task addresses to set up some sort of record of what got trapped. I see you already have a http://people.debian.org/~pasc/dda-feb.mbox for one time. In addition to the numbers that Cord gave, there was a fair amount of stuff caught on murphy. To the best of my knowledge, that's only checked when there's some debugging going on and so on. To give you an idea of the scale of things, 41 hours since the start of its month, murphy has stopped ~8500 emails from reaching the listmaster alias. As far as the stuff that gets trapped on my end goes, I give it a quick eyeball once every two-three days, but it has to jump out at me while I'm pressing the down key. Most requests are still taken care of however; you'll only hear about those that are not taken care of. Indeed. That is the nature of these things. Would a Debian Enquiry Response Team help? I'm not sure... Judging by the burnout we get in those sort of positions, I'm not sure that it would be that useful once the people silly enough to help have burnt out themselves. It looks rather like delegates are silently failing to answer email anyway. Maybe the DPL team will consider doing some mystery shopper tests of any delegates they've not heard from yet? I'd like to think we're trying to put a release out =-) [1]: I have to admit that I don't reply to people asking for messages to be removed and/or altered on the listarchives. While the current stated list archives policy is we don't do that, ever, I don't quite agree with that. There's no real concensus on changing that policy, and I'm not willing to cause a Problems with Mr Hakim thread on debian-devel just quite yet. I guess the proper thing is to point people to the policy at http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/#disclaimer and leave it at that. If they come back with that's a stupid policy then suggest that they try to develop a change and build consensus for it. I did that for a year before I gave up. Too many people would then complain about it, complain about us, complain about debian in general, ask for an exception to be made for them, ask to talk to our boss, tell us about how this was affecting their dying grandmother, explain to us that they were getting too much spam from it, etc etc. Cheers, Pasc (still wearing his listmaster are people too badge) -- Pascal Hakim 0403 411 672 Do Not Bend -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: feedback, please: what was good, what bad?
On Tue, 2005-04-12 at 19:17 -0600, Ean Schuessler wrote: On Tuesday 12 April 2005 7:53 pm, Pascal Hakim wrote: As a last resort, you can probably copy-paste the ballot from somewhere like: http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2005/04/msg00022.html Can I really do that? I thought that the hex crypto salt thingy does something magical for authenticity. As long as you keep everything between the lines marked do not delete, it'll be fine. I just confirmed this with Manoj, whitespace changes are ok as long as you don't change newlines. Cheers, Pasc -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian, lists and discrimination
On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 01:09:23PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote: There are 3 questions in this email and a lot of explanation. When almost all of a population is divided into two classes, postitive discrimination in favour of one class is usually indistinguishable from negative discrimination against the other. A discriminatory list has been created on lists.debian.org. The creation of debian-women was mentioned in the depths of the last bits from the listmasters It looks like you missed the fact that the debian-user-icelandic was also created. That list is even worse. Not only does it discriminates against non-icelandic speakers, it also discourages from people posting in english there. At least men are still allowed to post on debian-women. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/07/msg00013.html having previously been bug 252171. Sadly, I didn't spot those, so was unable to try to fix this new bug before now. There is no equivalent encouragement list for men, nor any attempt to address any other unrepresentative demographics. Those of you who read a lot of email may remember discrimination was discussed a bit (not always usefully) in the DPL elections: thread starting http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2004/03/msg00017.html and others. While it currently doesn't appear to be possible to subscribe to a pseudo-package, you can always subcribe to debian-bugs-dist if you wish to follow what's happening there. There's no equivalent list for men because no one has requested it. I suggest you have a look at http://lists.debian.org as this will not only let you know how to request a new list should you feel it's required but will also point out to you some unrepresented demographics that have lists. For example, debian-accessibility, debian-lex, debian-hams or debian-jr I only found out about this after Amaya emailed me questions about why I think debian-women is important and useful. I replied that I think it is important as a symbol of rampant sexism in debian and not useful at all in the long term. I don't know the sex of some of my debian collaborators and I do not see why it is so important. Of course, my views have not appeared on http://debian-women.opensource-knowhow.com/supporters.html - it seems there are only positive views there, even if some mention other skews. (I can't decide if Matthew Wilcox is being funny or serious, BTW.) Does debian really support sexism this much? What does Amaya's website have to do with anything? This new bout of sexism seems to have been triggered by Erinn Clark's pro-discrimination talk at debconf4. Slides might be http://cytosine.org/~helix/women_in_debian.pdf (no HTML version?) but ICBW. Workshops for young girls is discrimination, pure and simple. As the slides note, the DFSG say we don't allow copyright licences to discriminate against groups of people: should we allow the project to discriminate against men? Where does it discriminate against men? Looking at the subscriber list, I'd say between 1/3 and 1/2 of subscribers are men. A number of posters on the list are men. Where is the discrimination? To me, the most obvious fix is to replace debian-women with something like debian-equality or debian-welcome, to try to get people active against discrimination rather than actively promoting blatent sexism. The mailing list howto is clear on how to create lists, but not on the appropriate method for fixing bugs in list creation. What are the mechanics to do this? Build concensus on the list in question, then file a bug on the lists package, or get a listmaster to agree with you. If neither works, I guess you'll have to call a GR. ;-) I expect some flames for even asking about this, as the debian-women list seems to have attracted some aggressive sexists from other software-related groups already. I hope that people won't feed the trolls and it results in debian doing something better to tackle inequalities. Yes... it's a pity that krooger decided that this was a good place to spam with his 'marriage counseling services' ad. Hopefully, this won't happen again. Pasc (with his listmaster hat on) -- Pascal Hakim +61 4 0341 1672 Do Not Bend
Re: [OT] Re: A freak (but not so freak) idea: User space apt-get install
On Wed, Mar 10, 2004 at 10:26:51PM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote: Pascal Hakim dijo [Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 02:39:39PM +1100]: This email is licensed to the recipient for non-commercial use, duplication and distribution. --- This email is non-DFSG. We need to remove it from the list archives. That's brings up a good point. While Adam is probably joking here, there are a lot of people who want things in the archives either deleted or modified. Yes there are other archives, but they are not our responsability, while stuff on lists.debian.org is. How do we deal with stuff that's been forwarded to a list by a virus? How do we deal with a message that was sent by error? How do we deal with a message that was forwarded by a third party without authorization from the author? How do we deal with mistakes? We don't seem to have a clear policy on this at the moment. What should we do? http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/ Disclaimer / Privacy policy / Legal information The mailing lists are public forums. All emails sent to the lists are distributed both to the list subscribers and copied to the public archive, for people to browse or search without the need to be subscribed. Furthermore, you can browse our mailing lists as Usenet newsgroups. It can be done using a web interface, like Google or Gmane. There may be other places where lists are distributed -- please make sure you never send any confidential or unlicensed material to the lists. This includes things like e-mail addresses. Of particular note is the fact that spammers, viruses, worms etc have been known to abuse e-mail addresses posted to our mailing lists. Debian maintains the mailing lists in good faith and will take steps to curb all noticed abuse and maintain uninterrupted normal service. At the same time, Debian is not responsible for all mailing list posts or anything that may happen in relation to them. Please see our disclaimer of responsibility for more information. http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/disclaimer Our mailing lists are public forums, and our mailing list archives are public. By sending an email to such a public forum, you agree to public distribution of your article. All mails sent to any of our mailing lists (and to the bug tracking system) will be publically distributed and archived in our mailing list archives. Any emails sent by any one person directly to the list, or replies by others to those emails sent to the list, are considered published, in accordance with the United States law. Obviously the author still owns the copyright to the content of these emails that they have written. However, that does not mean that the Debian Project is under obligation to remove them from a list archive once published. Several legal counsels have reviewed this stance and confirmed it is correct. ...You will probably find more documents if you really want to ;-) Neither of those two documents say that we will keep all postings on the archives, or that we will remove them, they just say that we will if we want to. And in the case of a third party forwarding a message without permission, this bit doesn't even apply: By sending an email to such a public forum, you agree to public distribution of your article. All mails sent to any of our mailing lists (and to the bug tracking system) will be publically distributed and archived in our mailing list archives. And what happens if I find your home address, and telephone number or other address you don't want published, and I stick it on a debian list? Should it stay there? Pasc -- Pascal Hakim+61 4 0341 1672
Re: Spam on lists? [was: Re: serious problems with Mr. Troup]
On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 02:32:40PM +, MJ Ray wrote: On 2004-02-23 13:49:58 + Michael Banck [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Should we handle this technically by blocking further posts from abusers, as the listmasters proposed? Blocking or further moderation only if periodic summaries of refused posts, including sender addresses, were made to an appropriate place. Hi, We've got no plans to change the current system. Note that it's not actually moderated, it just checks that the email is signed by a key in the keyring. And trust me, you probably don't want to see the emails that are getting blocked (But if did, this month's are at [1]). It looks like there's something wrong with the sigcheck program too as it appears to be blocking some valid emails, but we're looking into that. Cheers, Pasc [1]: http://people.debian.org/~pasc/dda-feb.mbox -- Pascal Hakim+61 4 0341 1672
Debian mailing lists, address munging, news gateway, and the list archives
Hi everyone, I'd like to do something about the situation we currently have where people's email addresses are currently shown on both the list archives, and on news. I have talked to a number of people about this situation over the last few weeks, and I have not been able to find any form of concensus through private discussions, hence, I'd like to see what people here think. First part of this email is about address munging in news, and the second part is about address munging in our archives. 1. Address munging in news A number of you will be aware that Marco d'Itri, currently runs a set of mail -- news gateways, that replicate everything which is posted on some debian lists to usenet, and vice-versa. I have recently talked to Marco about how much munging of addresses should be done on the gateway between the two. Currently, all emails go through basically unmodified as far as email addresses go. A little while back, the Swen virus/worm started making its appearance. One of the ways in which Swen tries to spread is by reading email addresses on usenet, and emailing those addresses a message entitled something similar to Microsoft security update. Because of the news gateway, there is a 10-day window in which all posters to a list which is replicated to usenet, will receive those messages. If you check your email infrequently, this rapidly becomes a problem as you get flooded with a number of viruses. While the Swen virus is what provided my motivation to ask for a change, I think that a solution is needed even after that virus is gone. My main concern is that while most developers are able to cope with a high influx of incoming emails, a number of people on debian-user-* lists aren't. They either have hotmail or similar accounts, or very restricted ISP provided accounts. If you are also on a modem, downloading those viruses can be quite a problem. While there are a number of technical solutions, most of them are beyond the immediate reach of a new debian user. As I see it, we have two solutions to this problem. We can either munge all addresses in the To, From and maybe Reply-To fields, or stop mirroring the -user-* lists to usenet. Personally, I'm in favour of munging all addresses in those three fields before they go out on the news gateway, with an optional header which can be added if people wish their headers to stay in the clear. I'd like this to be done for all lists as well. Ideally, we would hide the address by replacing the domain part of the email address with something along the lines of hidden.invalid. If we decide that no automatic munging of email addresses should occur, we should seriously reconsider the use of the news gateway on the user lists. Marco believes that this is not acceptable, as it would make the gateway less useful for searching, and more difficult to use. He does not believe that it would be that useful. People I have talked to about this subject, tend to vary wildly in opinion about exactly what, if anything, needs to be done. I'm looking for some sort of public yet polite discussion on this topic. =-) *crosses fingers* 2. Address munging on list archives This is related to part 1. Basically, people have complained in the past about all email addresses being public in our list archives. Should we attempt to hide or disguise addresses in some way? What mechanisms if any should we provide for people to get email addresses. Why should people be able to get someone's email address from the list archives? I would like to know what people think about this issue, if only so we can mark the related bugs on the BTS as wontfix. ;-) Cheers, Pasc
