On the Internet, it’s important to secure all of your communications.

There are a number of applications which purport to give you “secure chat”, “secure email”, or “secure phone calls”.

The problem with these applications is that they advertise their presence. Since “insecure chat”, “insecure email” and “insecure phone calls” all have a particular, detectable signature, an interested observer may easily detect your supposedly “secure” communication. Not only that, but the places that you go to obtain them are suspicious in their own right. In order to visit Whisper Systems, you have to be looking for “secure” communications.

This allows the adversary to use “security” technologies such as encryption as a sort of stencil, to outline and highlight the communication that they really want to be capturing. In the case of the NSA, this dumps anyone who would like to have a serious private conversation with a friend into the same bucket, from the perspective of the authorities, as a conspiracy of psychopaths trying to commit mass murder.

The Snowden documents already demonstrate that the NSA does exactly this; if you send a normal email, they will probably lose interest and ignore it after a little while, whereas if you send a “secure” email, they will store it forever and keep trying to crack it to see what you’re hiding.

If you’re running a supposedly innocuous online service or writing a supposedly harmless application, the hassle associated with setting up TLS certificates and encryption keys may seem like a pointless distraction. It isn’t.

For one thing, if you have anywhere that user-created content enters your service, you don’t know what they are going to be using it to communicate. Maybe you’re just writing an online game but users will use your game for something as personal as courtship. Can we agree that the state security services shouldn’t be involved in that?. Even if you were specifically writing an app for dating, you might not anticipate that the police will use it to show up and arrest your users so that they will be savagely beaten in jail.

The technology problems that “secure” services are working on are all important. But we can’t simply develop a good “secure” technology, consider it a niche product, and leave it at that. Those of us who are software development professionals need to build security into every product, because users expect it. Users expect it because we are, in a million implicit ways, telling them that they have it. If we put a “share with your friend!” button into a user interface, that’s a claim: we’re claiming that the data the user indicates is being shared only with their friend. Would we want to put in a button that says “share with your friend, and with us, and with the state security apparatus, and with any criminal who can break in and steal our database!”? Obviously not. So let’s stop making the “share with your friend!” button actually do that.

Those of us who understand the importance of security and are in the business of creating secure software must, therefore, take on the Sisyphean task of not only creating good security, but of competing with the insecure software on its own turf, so that people actually use it. “Slightly worse to use than your regular email program, but secure” is not good enough. (Not to mention the fact that existing security solutions are more than “slightly” worse to use). Secure stuff has to be as good as or better than its insecure competitors.

I know that this is a monumental undertaking. I have personally tried and failed to do something like this more than once. As the Rabbi Tarfon put it, though:

It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.

As you may have seen me around the Internet, I am typically represented by an obscure symbol.

I have been asked literally hundreds of times about the meaning of that symbol, and I’ve always been cryptic in response because I felt that a full explanation is too much work. Since the symbol is something I invented, the invention is fairly intricate, and it takes some time to explain, describing it in person requires a degree of sustained narcissism that I’m not really comfortable with.

You all keep asking, though, and I really do appreciate the interest, so thanks to those of you who have asked over and over again: here it is. This is what the glyph means.

Ulterior Motive

I do have one other reason that I’m choosing to publish this particular tidbit now. Over the course of my life I have spent a lot of time imagining things, doing world-building for games that I have yet to make or books that I have yet to write. While I have published fairly voluminously at this point on technical topics (more than once on actual paper), as well as spoken about them at conferences, I haven’t made many of my fictional ideas public.

There are a variety of reasons for this (not the least of which that I have been gainfully employed to write about technology and nobody has ever wanted to do that for fiction) but I think the root cause is because I’m afraid that these ideas will be poorly received. I’m afraid that I’ll be judged according to the standards for the things that I’m now an expert professional at – software development – for something that I am a rank amateur at – writing fiction. So this problem is only going to get worse as I get better at the former and keep not getting practice at the latter by not publishing.

In other words, I’m trying to break free of my little hater.

So this represents the first – that I recall, at least – public sharing of any of the Divunal source material, since the Twisted Reality Demo Server was online 16 years ago. It’s definitely incomplete. Some of it will probably be bad; I know. I ask for your forbearance, and with it, hopefully I will publish more of it and thereby get better at it.

Backstory

I have been working on the same video game, off and on, for more or less my entire life. I am an extremely distractable person, so it hasn’t seen that much progress - at least not directly - in the last decade or so. I’m also relentlessly, almost pathologically committed to long-term execution of every dumb idea I’ve ever had, so any minute now I’m going to finish up with this event-driven networking thing and get back to the game. I’ll try to avoid spoilers, in case I’m lucky enough for any of you ever actually play this thing.

The symbol comes from early iterations of that game, right about the time that it was making the transition from Zork fan-fiction to something more original.

Literally translated from the in-game language, the symbol is simply an ideogram that means “person”, but its structure is considerably more nuanced than that simple description implies.

The world where Divunal takes place, Divuthan, was populated by a civilization that has had digital computers for tens of thousands of years, so their population had effectively co-evolved with automatic computing. They no longer had a concept of static, written language on anything like paper or books. Ubiquitous availability of programmable smart matter meant that the language itself was three dimensional and interactive. Almost any nuance of meaning which we would use body language or tone of voice to convey could be expressed in varying how letters were proportioned relative to each other, what angle they were presented at, and so on.

Literally every Divuthan person’s name is some variation of this ideogram.

So a static ideogram like the one I use would ambiguously reference a person, but additional information would be conveyed by diacritical marks consisting of other words, by the relative proportions of sizes, colors, and adornments of various parts of the symbol, indicating which person it was referencing.

However, the game itself is of the post-apocalyptic variety, albeit one of the more hopeful entries in that genre, since restoring life to the world is one of the player’s goals. One of the things that leads to the player’s entrance into the world is a catastrophe that has mysteriously caused most of the inhabitants to disappear and disabled or destroyed almost all of their technology.

Within the context of the culture that created the “glyph” symbol in the game world, it wasn’t really intended to be displayed in the form that you see it. The player first would first see such a symbol after entering a ruined, uninhabited residential structure. A symbol like this, referring to a person, would typically have adornments and modifications indicating a specific person, and it would generally be animated in some way.

The display technology used by the Divuthan civilization was all retained-mode, because I imagined that a highly advanced display technology would minimize power cost when not in use (much like e-paper avoids bleeding power by constantly updating the screen). When functioning normally, this was an irrelevant technical detail, of course; the displays displayed what you want them to display. But after a catastrophe that has disrupted network connectivity and ruined a lot of computers, this detail is important because many of the displays were still showing static snapshots of a language intended to use motion and interactivity as ways to convey information.

As the player wandered through the environment, they would find some systems that were still active, and my intent was (or “is”, I suppose, since I do still hold out hope that I’ll eventually actually make some version of this...) that the player would come to see the static, dysfunctional environment around them as melancholy, and set about restoring function to as many of these devices as possible in order to bring the environment back to life. Some of this would be represented quite concretely as time-travel puzzles later in the game actually allowed the players to mitigate aspects of the catastrophe that broke everything in the first place, thereby “resurrecting” NPCs by preventing their disappearance or death in the first place.

Coen

Coen refers to the self, the physical body, the notion of “personhood” abstractly. The minified / independent version is an ideogram for just the head, but the full version as it is presented in the “glyph” ideogram is a human body: the crook at the top is the head (facing right); the line through the middle represents the arms, and the line going down represents the legs and feet.

This is the least ambiguous and nuanced of all the symbols. The one nuance is that if used in its full form with no accompanying ideograms, it means “corpse”, since a body which can’t do anything isn’t really a person any more.

Kset

This is the trickiest ideogram to pronounce. The “ks” is meant to be voiced as a “click-hiss” noise, the “e” has a flat tone like a square wave from a synthesizer, and the “t” is very clipped. It is intended to reference the power-on sound that some of the earliest (remember: 10s of thousands of years before the main story, so it’s not like individuals have a memory of the way these things sounded) digital computers in Divuthan society made.

Honestly though if you try to do this properly it ends up sounding a lot like the English word “cassette”, which I assure you is fitting but completely unintentional.

Kset refers to algorithms and computer programs, but more generally, thought and the life of the mind.

This is a reference to the “Ee” spell power rune in the 80s Amiga game, Dungeon Master, which sadly I can’t find any online explanation of how the manual described it. It is an object poised on a sharp edge, ready to roll either left or right - in other words, a symbolic representation of a physical representation of the algorithmic concept of a decision point, or the computational concept of a branch, or a jump instruction.

Edec

Edec refers to connectedness. It is an ideogram reflecting a social graph, with the individual below and their many connections above them. It’s the general term for “social relationship” but it’s also the general term for “network protocol”. When Divuthan kids form relationships, they often begin by configuring a specific protocol for their communication.

This is how boundary-setting within friendships and work environments (and, incidentally, flirting) works; they use meta-protocol messages to request expanded or specialized interactions for use within the context of their dedicated social-communication channels.

Unlike most of these other ideograms, its pronunciation is not etymologically derived from an onomatopoeia, but rather from an acronym identifying one of the first social-communication protocols (long since obsoleted).

Zenk

“Zenk” is the ideogram for creation. It implies physical, concrete creations but denotes all types of creation, including intellectual products.

The ideogram represents the Divuthan version of an anvil, which, due to certain quirks of Divuthan materials science that is beyond the scope of this post, doubles for the generic idea of a “work surface”. So you could also think of it as a desk with two curved legs. This is the only ideogram which represents something still physically present in modern, pre-catastrophe Divuthan society. In fact, workshop surfaces are often stylized to look like a Zenk radical, as are work-oriented computer terminals (which are basically an iPad-like device the size of a dinner table).

The pronunciation, “Zenk”, is an onomatopoeia, most closely resembled in English by “clank”; the sound of a hammer striking an anvil.

Lesh

“Lesh” is the ideogram for communication. It refers to all kinds of communication - written words, telephony, video - but it implies persistence.

The bottom line represents a sheet of paper (or a mark on that sheet of paper), and the diagonal line represents an ink brush making a mark on that paper.

This predates the current co-evolutionary technological environment, because appropriately for a society featured in a text-based adventure game, the dominant cultural groups within this civilization developed a shared obsession for written communication and symbolic manipulation before they had access to devices which could digitally represent all of it.

All Together Now

There is an overarching philosophical concept of “person-ness” that this glyph embodies in Divuthan culture: although individuals vary, the things that make up a person are being (the body, coen), thinking (the mind, kset), belonging (the network, edec), making (tools, zenk) and communicating (paper and pen, lesh).

In summary, if a Divuthan were to see my little unadorned avatar icon next to something I have posted on twitter, or my blog, the overall impression that it would elicit would be something along the lines of:

“I’m just this guy, you know?”

And To Answer Your Second Question

No, I don’t know how it’s pronounced. It’s been 18 years or so and I’m still working that bit out.

It seems that docker is all the rage these days. Docker has popularized a powerful paradigm for repeatable, isolated deployments of pretty much any application you can run on Linux. There are numerous highly sophisticated orchestration systems which can leverage Docker to deploy applications at massive scale. At the other end of the spectrum, there are quick ways to get started with automated deployment or orchestrated multi-container development environments.

When you're just getting started, this dazzling array of tools can be as bewildering as it is impressive.

A big part of the promise of docker is that you can build your app in a standard format on any computer, anywhere, and then run it. As docker.com puts it:

“... run the same app, unchanged, on laptops, data center VMs, and any cloud ...”

So when I started approaching docker, my first thought was: before I mess around with any of this deployment automation stuff, how do I just get an arbitrary docker container that I've built and tested on my laptop shipped into the cloud?

There are a few documented options that I came across, but they all had drawbacks, and didn't really make the ideal tradeoff for just starting out:

1. I could push my image up to the public registry and then pull it down. While this works for me on open source projects, it doesn't really generalize.
2. I could run my own registry on a server, and push it there. I can either run it plain-text and risk the unfortunate security implications that implies, deal with the administrative hassle of running my own certificate authority and propagating trust out to my deployment node, or spend money on a real TLS certificate. Since I'm just starting out, I don't want to deal with any of these hassles right away.
3. I could re-run the build on every host where I intend to run the application. This is easy and repeatable, but unfortunately it means that I'm missing part of that great promise of docker - I'm running potentially subtly different images in development, test, and production.

I think I have figured out a fourth option that is super fast to get started with, as well as being reasonably secure.

What I have done is:

1. run a local registry
2. build an image locally - testing it until it works as desired
3. push the image to that registry
4. use SSH port forwarding to "pull" that image onto a cloud server, from my laptop

Before running the registry, you should set aside a persistent location for the registry's storage. Since I'm using boot2docker, I stuck this in my home directory, like so:

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me@laptop$ mkdir -p ~/Documents/Docker/Registry

To run the registry, you need to do this:

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me@laptop$ docker pull registry
...
Status: Image is up to date for registry:latest
me@laptop$ docker run --name registry --rm=true -p 5000:5000 \
    -e GUNICORN_OPTS=[--preload] \
    -e STORAGE_PATH=/registry \
    -v "$HOME/Documents/Docker/Registry:/registry" \
    registry

To briefly explain each of these arguments - --name is just there so I can quickly identify this as my registry container in docker ps and the like; --rm=true is there so that I don't create detritus from subsequent runs of this container, -p 5000:5000 exposes the registry to the docker host, -e GUNICORN_OPTS=[--preload] is a workaround for a small bug, STORAGE_PATH=/registry tells the registry to look in /registry for its images, and the -v option points /registry at the directory we previously created above.

It's important to understand that this registry container only needs to be running for the duration of the commands below. Spin it up, push and pull your images, and then you can just shut it down.

Next, you want to build your image, tagging it with localhost.localdomain.

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me@laptop$ cd MyDockerApp
me@laptop$ docker build -t localhost.localdomain:5000/mydockerapp .

Assuming the image builds without incident, the next step is to send the image to your registry.

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me@laptop$ docker push localhost.localdomain:5000/mydockerapp

Once that has completed, it's time to "pull" the image on your cloud machine, which - again, if you're using boot2docker, like me, can be done like so:

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me@laptop$ ssh -t -R 127.0.0.1:5000:"$(boot2docker ip 2>/dev/null)":5000 \
    mycloudserver.example.com \
    'docker pull localhost.localdomain:5000/mydockerapp'

If you're on Linux and simply running Docker on a local host, then you don't need the "boot2docker" command:

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me@laptop$ ssh -t -R 127.0.0.1:5000:127.0.0.1:5000 \
    mycloudserver.example.com \
    'docker pull localhost.localdomain:5000/mydockerapp'

Finally, you can now run this image on your cloud server. You will of course need to decide on appropriate configuration options for your applications such as -p, -v, and -e:

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me@laptop$ ssh mycloudserver.example.com \
    'docker run -d --restart=always --name=mydockerapp \
        -p ... -v ... -e ... \
        localhost.localdomain:5000/mydockerapp'

To avoid network round trips, you can even run the previous two steps as a single command:

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me@laptop$ ssh -t -R 127.0.0.1:5000:"$(boot2docker ip 2>/dev/null)":5000 \
    mycloudserver.example.com \
    'docker pull localhost.localdomain:5000/mydockerapp && \
     docker run -d --restart=always --name=mydockerapp \
        -p ... -v ... -e ... \
        localhost.localdomain:5000/mydockerapp'

I would not recommend setting up any intense production workloads this way; those orchestration tools I mentioned at the beginning of this article exist for a reason, and if you need to manage a cluster of servers you should probably take the time to learn how to set up and manage one of them.

However, as far as I know, there's also nothing wrong with putting your application into production this way. If you have a simple single-container application, then this is a reasonably robust way to run it: the docker daemon will take care of restarting it if your machine crashes, and running this command again (with a docker rm -f mydockerapp before docker run) will re-deploy it in a clean, reproducible way.

So if you're getting started exploring docker and you're not sure how to get a couple of apps up and running just to give it a spin, hopefully this can set you on your way quickly!

(Many thanks to my employer, Rackspace, for sponsoring the time for me to write this post. Thanks also to Jean-Paul Calderone, Alex Gaynor, and Julian Berman for their thoughtful review. Any errors are surely my own.)

If I am creating a new feature in library code, I have two choices with the implementation details: I can make them public - that is, exposed to application code - or I can make them private - that is, for use only within the library.

If I make them public, then the structure of my library is very clear to its clients. Testing is easy, because the public structures may be manipulated and replaced as the tests dictate. Inspection is easy, because all the data is exposed for clients to manipulate. Developers are happy when they can manipulate and test things easily. If I select "public" as the general rule, then developers using my library will be happy, because they'll be able to inspect and test everything quite easily whether I specifically designed in support for that or not.

However, now that they're public, I have to support them in their current form into the forseeable future. Since I tend to maintain the libraries I work on, and maintenance necessarily means change, a large public API surface means a lot of ongoing changes to exposed functionality, which means a constant stream of deprecation warnings and deprecated feature removals. Without private implementation details, there's no axis on which I can change my software without deprecating older versions. Developers hate keeping up with deprecation warnings or having their applications break when a new version of a library comes out, so if I adopt "public" as the general rule, developers will be unhappy.

If I make them private, then the structure of my library is a lot easier to understand by developers, because the API surface is much smaller, and exposes only the minimum necessary to accomplish their tasks. Because the implementation details are private, when I maintain the library, I can add functionality "for free" and make internal changes without requiring any additional work from developers. Developers like it when you don't waste their time with trivia and make it easier to get to what they want right away, and they love getting stuff "for free", so if I adopt "private" as the general rule, developers will be happy.

However, now that they're private, there's potentially no way to access that functionality for unforseen use-cases, and testing and inspection may be difficult unless the functionality in question was designed with an above-average level of care. Since most functionality is, by definition, designed with an average level of care, that means that there will inevitably be gaps in these meta-level tools until the functionality has already been in use for a while, which means that developers will need to report bugs and wait for new releases. Developers don't like waiting for the next release cycle to get access to functionality that they need to get work done right now, so if I adopt "private" as the general rule, developers will be unhappy.

Hmm.

I (along with about 6 million other people, according to the little statistics widget alongside it) just saw this rather heartbreaking post from Lennart Poettering.

I have not had much occasion to interact with Lennart personally, and (like many people) I have experienced bugs in the software he has written. I have been frustrated by those bugs. I may not have always been charitable in my descriptions of his software. I have, however, always assumed good faith on his part and been happy that he continues making valuable contributions to the free software ecosystem. I haven’t felt the need to make that clear in the past because I thought it was understood.

Apparently, not only is it not understood, there is active hostility directed against his participation. There is constant, aggressive, bad-faith attempts to get him to stop working on the important problems he is working on.

So, Lennart,

Thank you for your work on GNOME, for working on the problem of getting free software into the hands of normal people.

Thank you for furthering the cause of free software by creating PulseAudio, so that we can at least attempt to allow users to play sound on their Linux computers from multiple applications simultaneously without writing tedious configuration files.

Thank you for your work on SystemD, attempting to bring modern system-startup and service-management practices to the widest possible free software audience.

Thank you, Lennart, for putting up with all these vile personal attacks while you have done all of these things. I know you could have walked away; I’m sure that at times, you wanted to. Thank you for staying anyway and continuing to do the good work that you’ve done.

While the abuse is what prompted me to write this, I should emphasize that my appreciation is real. As a long-time user of Linux both on the desktop and in the cloud, I know that my life has been made materially better by Lennart’s work.

This shouldn’t be read as an endorsement of any specific technical position that Mr. Poettering holds. The point is that it doesn’t have to be: this isn’t about whether he’s right or not, it’s about whether we can have the discussion about whether he’s right in a calm, civil, technical manner. In fact I don’t agree with all of his technical choices, but I’m not going to opine about that here, because he’s putting in the work and I’m not, and he’s fighting many battles for software freedom (most of them against our so-called “allies”) that I haven’t been involved in.

The fact that he felt the need to write an article on the hideous state of the free software community is as sad as it is predictable. As a guest on a podcast recently, I praised the Linux community’s technical achievements while critiquing its poisonous culture. Now I wonder if “critiquing” is strong enough; I wonder if I should have given any praise at all. We should all condemn this kind of bilious ad-hominem persecution.

Today I am saying “thank you” to Lennart because the toxicity in our communities is not a vague, impersonal force that we can discuss academically. It is directed at specific individuals, in an attempt to curtail their participation. We need to show those targetted people, regardless of how high-profile they are, or whether they’re paid for their work or not, that they are not alone, that they have our gratitude. It is bullying, pure and simple, and we should not allow it to stand.

Software is made out of feelings. If we intend to have any more free software, we need to respect and honor those feelings, and, frankly speaking, stop trying to make the people who give us that software feel like shit.