A fairly nice stout… although not enough to dislodge my favourite go-to stouts (hint: not the watery rubbish that passes for Guinness).
Monk’s Stout Dupont
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Daily Archives: 2012-06-28
Telstra has a database of your NextG web activity
So, in what must be my biggest blog day ever, Telstra posted this:Â http://exchange.telstra.com.au/2012/06/28/further-update-telstra-smart-controls-cyber-safety-tool/
What is clear from their previous post and the pickup in the media (including ABC, Crikey and news.com.au) is that people care about this, a lot.
What is also clear is that they’ve had to go and talk to the Privacy Commissioner, the Australian Communication and Media Authority, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman and the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network.
I’d like to thank Senator Ludlam for raising this with Telstra government affairs which without a doubt helped raise the profile of this issue.
There are a couple of issues with Telstra’s updated statement:
- They admit to constructing a database with your full query string and IP address
- They don’t address the moral issue of being involved with a company so involved in curtailing human rights (Netsweeper).
- Just stripping out the query string doesn’t erase all personal information
I don’t think we can ignore any of these problems, and I hope we get good responses and resolutions to them.
The significance of point 1 should not be understated. This means that some people, somewhere, have access to a decent amount of your browsing history. There is no details on who has access to this (hint: law enforcement could probably request it). There is also no explanation about why this was applied to everyone.
Update: after rereading their blog post, at best I can say it’s ambiguous on if they stored this or not. One sentence implies that they do, another implies that they don’t. Clarification would be most welcome, and given the history so far, we should not assume the best.
Personally, I’m really disappointed in Telstra for at any point thinking it’s okay to finance human rights abuses. I’m also really disappointed in world governments for permitting the sale of such software to those who use it to oppress their people. We should be in the business of exporting freedom and democracy, not exporting tyranny and oppression.
If you have a NextG handset, I strongly suggest the following:
- iOS device users (iPad and iPhone): Go look at Onion Browser
- Android users: read my post http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/2012/06/28/tor-firefox-twitter-not-rooted-android-awesome/
New Jenkins Bazaar plugin release! 1.18
From the desk of your new Bazaar plugin for Jenkins maintainer, I give you Version 1.18.
This release has two good bug fixes:
- UI fix for checkout option (JENKINS-12261)
- Auto-recover from corrupt BZR branches (e.g. bzr branch/checkout killed at inopportune moment) by cleaning the workspace and trying again (this is now default behaviour, best used with the Jenkins SCM retry count feature being > 1)
We’ve been running the same code as this release at Percona for about 2 months now (the second bugfix was one I wanted to test first before submitting upstream). This is the big fix that fixed all our problems with using bazaar with Jenkins in a large deployment.
The other news? I’m now maintainer, and this is my first release.
The page on the Jenkins wiki is here:
and updates should come through the standard Jenkins channels as all the auto-foo happens.
Hacking the Jenkins BZR plugin
For Drizzle and for all of the projects we work on at Percona we use the Bazaar revision control system (largely because it’s what we were using at MySQL and it’s what MySQL still uses). We also use Jenkins.
We have a lot of jobs in our Jenkins. A lot. We build upstream MySQL 5.1, 5.5 and 5.6, Percona Server 5.1, Percona Server 5.5, XtraBackup 1.6, 2.0 and 2.1. For each of these we also have the normal trunk builds as well as parameterised ones that allow a developer to test out a tree before they ask for it to be merged. We also have each of these products across seven operating systems and for each of those both x86 32bit and 64bit. If we weren’t already in the hundreds of jobs, we certainly are once you multiply out between release and debug and XtraBackup being across so many MySQL and Percona Server versions.
I honestly would not be surprised if we had the most jobs of any user of the Bazaar plugin to Jenkins, and we’re probably amongst the top few of all Jenkins installations.
So, in August last year we discovered a file descriptor leak in the Bazaar plugin. Basically, garbage collection doesn’t get kicked off when you run out of file descriptors. This prevented us from even starting back up Jenkins until I found and fixed the bug. Good times.
We later hit a bug that was triggered in the parallel loading of jobs during startup. We could get stuck in an infinite loop during Jenkins starting that would just eat CPU and get nowhere. Luckily Jenkins provides a workaround: specify “-Djenkins.model.Jenkins.parallelLoad=false” as an argument and it just does it single threaded. For us, this solves that problem.
We were also hitting another problem. If you kill bzr at just the wrong time, you can leave the repository in not an entirely happy state. An initial branch can be killed at a time where it’ll think it’s a repository rather than a checkout and there’s a bunch of other weirdness (including file system corruption if you happen to use bad VM software).
The way we were solving this was to sometimes go and “clean workspace” on the jobs that needed it (annoying with matrix builds). We’d switched to just doing “clean tree” for a bunch of builds. The problem with doing a clean tree was that “bzr branch” to check out the source code could take a very long time – especially for Percona Server which is a branch of MySQL and hence has hundreds of megabytes of history.
We couldn’t use bzr shared repositories as we kept hitting concurrency bugs when more than one jenkins job was trying to do a bzr operation at the same time (common when matrix builds kick off builds for release and debug for example).
So.. I fixed that in the Jenkins bazaar plugin too (which should be in an upcoming release) and we’ve been running it on our Jenkins instance for the past ~2 months.
Basically, if we fail to check out the Bazaar tree, we wipe it clean and try again (Jenkins has a “retry count” for source checkouts). This is a really awesome form of self healing. Even if the bazaar team fixed all the bugs, we’d still have to go and get that new version of bzr on all our build machines – including ancient systems such as CentOS 5. Not as much fun as bashing your head into a vice.
After all of that, I seem to now be the maintainer of the Bazaar plugin for Jenkins as Monty pointed out I was using it a lot more than him and kept finding and fixing bugs.
Soooo… say hello to the new Jenkins Bazaar plugin maintainer, me.
Yes, I maintain Java code now. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Tor + Firefox + Twitter + (not rooted) Android = awesome
Update: As of October 2015, you should likely install the OrFox browser which is from The Tor Project and is a port of the Tor Browser to Android. Installing OrBot and OrFox makes browsing through Tor on an Android device easy. The rest of this blog entry is left in-tact for historical record, but as of now, look at OrFox rather than this process.
This is actually pretty simple to get going once you know how. This is a short “HOWTO use Tor on Android”
Basic problem: I want to use Tor on my phone. If you’re wondering why, perhaps my previous posts on Telstra and what they do to your traffic may be a good hint.
First of all, you’re going to want to install OrBot. It’s available from the Google Play store. There is absolutely no harm in leaving this running all the time in the background. I have found it to have zero impact on battery life of my phone (the Battery thing in settings doesn’t show OrBot at all).
With OrBot running, you now have a HTTP and SOCKS proxy available on your phone. This means you can set any app that can use a HTTP or SOCKS proxy to do their Internet access through Tor instead of directly through your Wifi or cellular network.
The Twitter client wonderfully has built in support for using a HTTP proxy. You just need to go into the Twitter app’s Settings, click “Enable HTTP Proxy”, and set “Proxy Host” to localhost and “Proxy Port” to 8118. You are now done. You can test this by disabling OrBot and then trying to refresh your Twitter stream. If it doesn’t work, then Twitter is trying to use the (not running) Tor proxy. Re-enable OrBot to be able to use your Twitter client. This “just works”.
There is pretty much no excuse not to have your phone Twitter client go through Tor. We all know that Twitter gets all sorts of legal queries for information about users. We also know that they’ve been fairly good about it, and indeed hats off to Twitter for being awesome. But… guess what? We can just ensure they don’t have any information worth handing over :)
Next step… Web Browsing. The Firefox Beta is pretty awesome. It’s fast and usable (which is exactly what you want in a web browser). This may also work with the standard Firefox browser (I’m not sure when they’ve updated it to be on par with the Firefox Beta version I’ve been using).
There is no place to specify proxy settings in the normal UI (I do hope Mozilla add this). But not to worry, Firefox on Android is built on the same base as Firefox on the desktop, so it does support it (there just isn’t a good UI).
What you need to do is go to the URL bar and go to “about:config”. This shows every little thing you can tweak in Firefox (a lot). Luckily, there’s a search bar. Search for “proxy” and modify the following settings to the following values (the = sign means “click modify and enter the value after the =”):
- network.proxy.http = 127.0.0.1
- network.proxy.http_port = 8118
- network.proxy.socks = 127.0.0.1
- network.proxy.socks_port = 9050
- network.proxy.ssl = 127.0.0.1
- network.proxy.ssl_port = 8118
- network.proxy.type = 1
- UPDATED: network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to “true†(click “toggle”)
Then head to http://check.torproject.org to check that it’s working!
This doesn’t provide you with all the features and benefits of using the TorButton in the desktop firefox, but it will stop your mobile phone provider spying on all the web sites you visit (unless they break into your phone itself).
Luckily, Android is fairly awesome and whenever you try to open a URL it can ask you what program you want to use to do that with. Guess what? Just select the Firefox you configured with Tor to open it and you’re browsing through Tor. Brilliant and easy with no need to go and “root your phone” or anything else that may turn people off from doing so.
Update: Thanks should also go to François Marier for his site that helped me get this right: http://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/2012/06/browsing-privacy-and-ad-blocking-on.html
Update: Added setting of socks_remote_dns