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The Crisis of Austrian Democracy

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a piece that I wrote for the University of Minnesota Center for Austrian Studies back in the fall that I’d been meaning to post here for a while…and now need to update.

Austria has been without a permanent government since the election in late October 2024. The collapse of ÖVP-SPÖ-NEOS negotiations left the ÖVP Moderate Leader and Chancellor, Karl Nehammer twisting in the wind and his resignation was (likely) forced by a group of Sebastian Kurz (former chancellor, boy wonder, far-right sympathizer, and now employee of Peter Thiel) supporters. Kurz and the entire Lower Austrian ÖVP–the most powerful ÖVP state party–seemed determined to go into government, tragically yet again, with the extreme right Freedom Party (FPÖ).

Enter the Bundespräsident stage left

Austria’s president Alexander Van der Bellen with help from the incompetence and lust for power of FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl is more or less the last institution capable of standing in the way of a FPÖ-ÖVP government with the FPÖ’s extremist leader as Chancellor. For this reason, it again seems likely that the next government will be lead by the ÖVP with support from the Socialists, NEOS (Centrist Liberals), and Greens. Only time will tell. But Austria faces a fork in the road between it’s current liberal-social capitalist pro-EU system and the Orban-ization of its media, judiciary, and society.

Choose wisely, liebes Österreich.

What now follows is the report as published by the Center for Austrian Studies which is also archived at the UMN Libraries University Digital Conservancy.

Austria’s 2024 Federal Election: Turning Point for the Far Right

Eleven Years of Turmoil

Exactly eleven years prior to Austria’s Federal Election on September 29th, 2024, I stood in a corner of the offices of the Alliance for Austria’s Future (BZÖ) chatting with my contacts in the party. Their hopes of remaining a federal parliamentary party hung by a thread. Originally founded in 2005 as a moderate governing splinter from the evermore far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), the BZÖ had attempted to reconstitute itself as a social centrist and economically liberal party in the mould of the German FDP (Free Democratic Party). Numerous vestiges of its far-right past remained. Pictures of and a memorial to its late founder, Jörg Haider, adorned a wall in the large room in which we’d gathered. Nevertheless, the BZÖ’s federal election candidates appeared to be sincere in their desire to build a “modern middle” party. However, they were not successful, falling short of the 4% national threshold by a few thousand votes.¹ While the BZÖ might be gone, the legacy of their party’s firebrand founder continues to echo into the present, as the 2013 election also marked a break in the Austrian political landscape.

Then BZÖ leader Josef Bucher attempts to mask his disappointment to skeptical journalists on Election Night 2013. Photo by the Author.

For most of Austria’s post-World War II history, the country, its constituent Länder (states), and even its municipalities had been governed by a system known as Proporz, whereby political power was primarily shared between the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) and the center-right (Christian Democratic) People’s Party (ÖVP), and based on the number of votes each party received. On a formal level this meant that villages, cities, and states were almost always governed by a coalition of the SPÖ and ÖVP with the actual composition of the cabinet determined by election results. The purpose of Proporz was to eliminate the instability of governments that plagued interwar Austria and ensure the broadest possible interest in preserving the constitutional order. At the same time, a 4% vote-share requirement (similar to Germany’s 5%) to receive seats in the Nationalrat or state parliaments further ensured that the formation of stable governments was not impeded by numerous small parties threatening to withhold critical support. On the federal level, there was no legally mandated Proporz system, but the small number of parties and a political culture that valued stability and compromise over ideological victories more or less ensured that the only way to form a stable majority government was a combination of SPÖ and ÖVP. If the fracturing of this system began with the emergence of the Greens on the left and the FPÖ on the far-right in the 1980s, 2013 marked the last gasps of the Proporz party system, as seven parties had legitimate chances to reach the 4% threshold to elect members of the Nationalrat (the lower house of the Austrian parliament). The aforementioned SPÖ, ÖVP, FPÖ, and BZÖ, the Greens, the right-wing populist Team Stronach, and the centrist NEOS all reached the 4% threshold, with only the BZÖ falling short. And while the resulting government was a coalition of the SPÖ and ÖVP, its majority was small, and its leading figures unhappy, with both parties’ leaders replaced before the next election.

In the years since, the political scene has been the site of uncharacteristic turmoil: the 2017 Election resulted in the rebranded and “modernized” Christian Democrats forming a government with the FPÖ under the 31 year-old Sebastian Kurz, only to collapse two years later in the wake of a scandal. During the months leading up to the 2017 elections, undercover journalists recorded a video of FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache pleading with a woman pretending to be a Russian oligarch’s niece for party financing, which would help turn Austria into an illiberal democracy in the style of Victor Orban’s Hungary The collapse of that ÖVP-FPÖ coalition government after the so-called Ibiza-Affäre² led to the first ever technocratic government under a former Constitutional Court justice (and first woman chancellor, Brigitte Bierlein), and subsequently: the resulting election yielded an ÖVP-Green coalition, the first ever Austrian federal government featuring the Greens.

The ÖVP-Greens government navigated the COVID-19 Pandemic, the backlash against masks and vaccine mandates, Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and economic turmoil relatively successfully, but nevertheless suffered from a variety of attacks from the far-right, many of which bore the hallmarks of foreign (ie., Russian) misinformation and influence campaigns.

Campaign Themes

Austria’s 2024 election featured parties attempting to play to their strengths. FPÖ voters were driven by the party’s core themes around immigration, policing, neutrality, and security, while ÖVP voters chose the performance of the ÖVP-led coalition. SPÖ voters concentrated on social and economic justice (healthcare, inflation, and income inequality), while the Greens focused on the environment, and the NEOS education, the economy, and inflation.

In the end, and as in the Dutch elections of November 2023, the far-right populist party was the most successful party at making its case with voters. Similar to the Dutch case with the PVV (Party for Freedom), the FPÖ’s successes were fueled in part by opposition to EU intervention in Ukraine following Russia’s 2022 invasion.³ However, and unlike in the Netherlands, Austria features a unique twist to far-right politics: its neutrality, which the far-right has weaponized regarding support for Ukraine. Enshrined in the constitution after 1945 as a condition for avoiding Cold War partition (as happened with occupied Germany), neutrality has long been considered the keystone of Austrian foreign policy outside the EU, and by politicians across the ideological spectrum.⁴ In part due to its strong connections to the United Russia Party, and in light of its ongoing refusal to condemn Russian actions while spreading Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine, the Austrian far-right (including the FPÖ) has used Austrian Neutrality to condemn the governing parties as reckless warmongers. Indeed, weaponizing NATO and allied support for Ukraine was first attempted during the initial 2014 Russian invasion in the E.U. parliamentary elections, as videos of tanks loaded on trains in the US or other NATO member states purportedly moved through Austrian cities to start World War III.⁵ Even as “deepfake” and AI generated images and video are now easier to create than ever and therefore far more dangerous, the spread of misinformation was already rampant in 2014. Automated “bot” accounts on social media platforms and further distribution by FPÖ-allied media played a not-so-insignificant role in spreading these messages during this election.

2024 Election Results

The surge in the popularity of the FPÖ notwithstanding, the 2024 election marks the first time in post-war Austrian history that neither the ÖVP nor SPÖ led on election night, a genuinely remarkable result.

Party	Percentage	Votes
FPÖ	28.85%	1,408,514
ÖVP	26.27%	1,282,734
SPÖ	21.14%	1,032,234
NEOS	9.14%	446,378
Greens	8.24%	402,107
KPÖ (Communists)	2.39%	116,891
Voter Turnout	77.7%
Source: ORF/Election Commission

Austrian Election Results since 1945. The name of the parties forming the Goverment are listed for each legislative period.

In turn, the election portends deep trouble for the SPÖ. Having been part of the government almost continuously from 1945 to 2017, their failure to meaningfully improve their performance from 2019 and reverse their continued decline from 2017, and despite not participating in an unpopular government, should be seen as a warning sign for their political future. The failure of the KPÖ–a mix of disaffected socialists formerly supporting the SPÖ to outright communists–is no doubt disappointing, but their continued success at the local and state level, notably in Steiermark and Salzburg, makes it likely that they could overcome the 4% electoral hurdle by the next election.

Thunder on the Right

By tradition, the leading party will have the first opportunity to form a government. This means the FPÖ, under the leadership of the most radical leader in their history, Herbert Kickl.⁶ Unlike previous FPÖ leaders who publicly kept the most extreme elements of the far-right at a distance, Kickl has openly embraced them. Shortly before taking office as FPÖ leader in 2021, he called the Identitäre Bewegung (Identitarian Movement), an organization Austrian intelligence services deem right-wing extremist with ties to neo-Nazis, an “interesting project that is worthy of support.” Kickl did so only days after the FPÖ’s then interim leader and governing board declared that membership in the group to be incompatible with membership in the party.⁷ His taking office as party leader was made possible only by ousting the relatively moderate (by FPÖ standards) Norbert Hofer, a politician known for his affable personality and charm. While some might argue that they share similar views, Kickl’s embrace of the extreme-right Identitarians in contradiction with other FPÖ leaders and his aggressive articulation of hard-line anti-immigration policies using rhetoric more commonly heard in the 1920s and 30s underscore the end of FPÖ attempts to appear relatively moderate as they had under Strache and Hofer.

Kickl was previously Minister of the Interior, with oversight over policing, intelligence, and border controls. Coincidentally, Kickl is also one of the most tightly bound to Russian influence networks and it is likely that he will, in conjunction with the Hungarian and Slovak governments, attempt to delay or block European defense and security efforts as well as additional aid to Ukraine.⁸ Just as during the 2017-2019 ÖVP-FPÖ coalition, which Kickl directly managed the Austrian intelligence services, an FPÖ government makes it very likely that Austria will be roundly excluded from EU and broader western intelligence and security cooperation, while Russian intelligence agencies would continue to use Austria as a major staging and transit point for operations throughout Europe and even further abroad. In sum, Austria would face increasing isolation from its EU and Western allies at all levels and in all areas of cooperation.⁹

Who Governs?

Kickl has also made it clear that any FPÖ led coalition government will only be formed if Federal President Van der Bellen appoints him chancellor.¹⁰ Van der Bellen, formerly a member of the Green Party, however has the power to give the task of attempting to form a government to the party that he deems most likely to succeed.¹¹ As of this writing in late-October, Van der Bellen tasked the current chancellor and moderate leader of the ÖVP Karl Nehammer with responsibility for forming a new government, arguing that Kickl’s FPÖ, despite coming first in the election, had no hope of forming a government with no willing coalition partners.¹² The most likely outcome will be for a new coalition led by the ÖVP, with the SPÖ and centrist NEOS party as the junior partners. For the current leadership of the ÖVP, Kickl and the FPÖ are simply too toxic and their views too extreme to contemplate joining a coalition with them, let alone one in which the ÖVP would be the junior partner.

Kickl however is not without cards to play. On October 24th, the FPÖ nominated Walter Rosenkranz, a close Kickl ally to the post of First President of the Nationalrat. The three presidents are selected by the three largest parties and in practice primarily serve to facilitate the business of the legislature. Rosenkranz seems poised to use this position to hinder the work of the new coalition government as much as possible. This is also a further blow to FPÖ moderates like Hofer, who previously served as the FPÖ’s nominee as Third President of the Nationalrat. As with Kickl, Rosenkranz has a reputation for extremism, with the president of the largest organization for Austrian Jews describing him as a “brown [ie., Nazi] wolf in blue [FPÖ color] clothes.”¹³ While it is possible that he will use his position in a relatively non-partisan way, his selection as the FPÖ’s candidate over the previously serving Hofer makes that highly unlikely.

Conclusion

Austria’s election marks a significant turning point for the far right, achieving their first ever first-place finish in a national election. It is a remarkable turn of events since 2019, for a party whose longtime leader was caught soliciting illicit funds from a person they thought to be a Russian oligarch’s niece. For the mainstream parties that up to this point had been the ruling parties (i.e., the ÖVP and SPÖ), the chance to form a new grand coalition is perhaps a meaningful opportunity for both parties to demonstrate their willingness and ability to cooperate productively and win back support previously lost to the FPÖ. Finally, this moment suggests that, if mainstream parties are to counter the rise of the extreme illiberal right in Europe, whether the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany, the Freedom Party (PVV) in the Netherlands, or the FPÖ itself they must be both smart and quick in addressing the meaningful problems that voters for these parties face, while also delegitimizing the factually incorrect narratives those parties use to garner support.

For a general overview of the 2013 Election written and published shortly thereafter: Dolezal, Martin, and Eva Zeglovits. 2014. “Almost an Earthquake: The Austrian Parliamentary Election of 2013.” West European Politics 37 (3): 644–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2024.2397629.

I would note that that I disagreed with their assessment at the time and I believe have been proven largely correct. ↩︎
The original videos can be found on the websites of the Süddeutsche Zeitung (https://www.sueddeutsche.de/projekte/artikel/politik/das-strache-video-e335766/) or Der Spiegel (https://www.spiegel.de/video/fpoe-chef-heinz-christian-strache-die-videofalle-video-99027174.html), both accessed 11 October 2024. ↩︎
On the Dutch case, see: Holsteyn, Joop J. M. van, and Galen A. Irwin. 2024. “The Dutch Parliamentary Elections of November 2023.” West European Politics, published online 11 September 2024. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2024.2397629 (accessed 11 October 2024). ORF polling on voter motives for the primary themes of the Austrian election: https://orf.at/wahl/nr24/wahlmotive/themen-wahlkampf (accessed 11 October 2024) ↩︎
Hence why Austria avoided joining the organizations that evolved into the European Union until after the collapse of the Soviet Union and even then, only with the tacit approval of the Russian government. ↩︎
This video features Ewald Stadler, a former member of the FPÖ and BZÖ and former member of the Nationalrat and European Parliament. Stadler continues to be very active in extreme-right circles across Central Europe. This video comes from his unsuccessful 2014 European Parliament campaign after founding his own short lived “Reform Konservativen” party. “MEP Ewald Stadler REKOS Panzertransport durch Österreich Ukraine Krise 29 04 2014” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51zs9-OAJOQ (accessed 22 October 2024) ↩︎
Although Kickl rejects any comparisons to National Socialism, he uses terms such as “Volkskanzler” (“[ethnically German] people’s chancellor” which also appeared in Nazi rhetoric from the 1920s and 1930s to describe Hitler. ↩︎
“Kickl: ‘Die Identitären sind für mich so etwas wie eine NGO von rechts’” Kurier (9 June 2021). https://kurier.at/politik/inland/kickl-die-identitaeren-sind-fuer-mich-so-etwas-wie-eine-ngo-von-rechts/401407830 (accessed 18 October 2024) ↩︎
Lindholm, Rickard. “Austrians doubling down on neutrality means European security faces uphill battle.” 1 October 2024. Wilson Center, Washington D.C. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/austrians-doubling-down-neutrality-means-european-security-faces-uphill-battle (Accessed 12 October 2024) ↩︎
ibid. ↩︎
Stepan, Max. “Kickl zu Van der Bellen: “FPÖ-Regierung nur mit mir als Bundeskanzler.” 5 October 2024. Der Standard https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000239567/kickl-zu-van-der-bellen-fpoe-regierung-nur-mit-mir-als-bundeskanzler (accessed 12 October 2024) ↩︎
Traditionally, the Austrian federal president resigns any party memberships upon taking office; Marchart, Jan Michael, Walter Müller, and Michael Völker. “Wie ÖVP und SPÖ in eine Regierung finden könnten – und wo es dabei holpert.” 12 October 2024. Der Standard. https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000240424/wie-oevp-und-spoe-in-eine-regierung-finden-koennten-und-wo-es-dabei-holpert (Accessed 12 October 2024) ↩︎
Murphy, Francois. “Austrian president tasks centre-right, not far right, with forming govt.” 22 October 2024. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/austrian-conservatives-again-rule-out-far-right-alliance-after-leaders-meet-2024-10-15/ (accessed 23 October 2024). ↩︎
Traar, Christina. “Oskar Deutsch warnt Nationalrat vor FPÖ-Mann Rosenkranz.” 23 October 2024. Kleine Zeitung. https://www.kleinezeitung.at/politik/innenpolitik/18999415/deutsch-warnt-nationalrat-vor-fpoe-mann-rosenkranz (Accessed 23 October 2024) ↩︎

don't be one of those people, part 2

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

following some discussions both on Mastodon and IRC after my post yesterday about Linux vs. Mac I think (and here I have Nora Tindall to thank for asking) about the apparent difference between my experience with MacOS and Void Linux+BSPWM which made me realize that I am much much closer to what I want tht Linux experience to be on Mac and the Mac Experience on Linux. But wtf does that mean?

It means that I love having my windows tiled and managed automatically. For this I have Amethyst. I wish I could just port my bspwm config into it.

It means I love MacOS’s global menus which change based on the application but are always in the same place. It means no matter the application I can hit cmd+F1 and get to the menu bar without taking my hands off the keyboard. It means that the command key I use the most on MacOS is the also the most ergonomically placed. Why the fuck is control way out in lala land on the edge?

It means that I appreciate how lightweight Void is. My Thinkpad regularly uses about 500mb of RAM (without firefox). The vast majority of MacOS’s RAM usage is shit I never use.

It means I love not spending so much goddamned time fucking with xmodmap in the event that my special keyboard layout stops working right. It means I can use Karabiner, an ugly if perferctly function GUI keyboard layout editor to make new layouts. in less time that it’ll take to read the relevant manpages.

It means that I can order a Mac laptop with the hardware keyboard layout I want. Direct, from the factory, no problem. Yes you can drop in a new keyboard on some Thinkpads, I did. but it helps if the new keyboard isn’t a few mm wider than the old layout one. it works, at least. The keyboard backlight does not (I couldn’t get the connector to stay in :/). If you order from Lenovo in the United States, your options are US-English or Spanish keyboards only, for reasons passing understanding. Are they making EU computers in a different factory? What makes it impossible for them to do the decent thing and let people order different keyboards if they’re already making each machine to order? If you order from Apple in the US, you can choose whichever keyboard layout you want.

It means that I can buy applications from small and indie devs who spend their time just making their applications better. Not, for example, getting into arguments with random assholes on github. cf. using Devonthink and Mailmate which I referenced yesterday. I wish very badly that Linux had a culture of shareware and small indie devs like Mac does. An obsessive commitment to everything being F(L)OSS does not necessarily result in good software.

It means I wish—more than people might think—that I wasn’t tied to a single company that makes a lot of shitty choices. I share a lot of the concerns that JWZ et al have.¹ ²

I write almost everything using nano. I love fish. The first application I open when I start up my machine is a terminal (iTerm2, sadly mac only, or Alacritty which I also use on linux). Maybe someday Darling will be ready to fully support GUI apps. Maybe, someday I’ll be able to run Mailmate and Devonthink on Linux. I hope that day comes.

In sum, I am a lot closer to how many linux users want to use their computers than the median mac user. Which is maybe what upsets me the most about the linux vs. mac nonsense.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/tag/mac/ ↩︎
cf. Riccardo Mori’s ongoing critique of ~~Mac OS~~ macOS design evolution, eg., The Notch is Wrong ↩︎

don't be one of those people

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My first computer, which we got when I was 6 years old was a second-hand Macintosh SE from my aunt. It was a Big Deal in my household. I remember the smell it made when you turned it on. The tiny black and white CRT. The sound of its 3.5" floppy drive. It was a great computer.

Or what an upgrade it was when we got an iMac in the late 90s. Or an eMac in the early 2000s. Or my first Intel Mac, a 2006 MacBook Pro. And what a great keyboard that thing had!

In short, I have been a Mac user all my life.

I’ve tried really hard to get into using linux as more than a server OS. Notably, following a directive from my boss at the time, I dualbooted a MacBook Pro with CentOS (not the best way to go about that, TBQH). I am an active member of the tildeverse, a confederation of pubnix (primarily Linux and some BSD) systems.

I have a 2016 ThinkPad T460s at home with Void Linux. I have a 2014 Mac Mini running Void. I maintain packages on Void and do my best as I’m able to contribute to that community. This is all to say nothing of the nine (9!) Debian VPSes I run, including this one, and one Void VPS.

When the 2016 MacBook Pros came out with their shitty keyboards and USB-C only, I was really worried that my days on the mac were numbered. I was a grad student at the time with no idea what the future held for me. And there are Mac only applications I use—Devonthink or MailMate—which lack anything remotely equivalent on Linux.

Writing emails in markdown or plain text with a clean UI and keyboard commands for everything or organizing documents and running OCR on shit as needed would be pretty logical things for linux to have, or so I’d thought. But good luck even getting Neomutt and Notmuch and whatever else you fucking need for basic email on linux in 2023 not called Thunderbird or—god help you—Gnome Evolution or Geary. I tried, I tried really fucking hard.

Don’t get me started on how much fucking PDF manipulation on linux sucks. how you can’t even manage to do something like MacOS’ Preview application can do in a cleanly written UI. As I’ve said before:

it is the year of our lord 2022 and Linux still can’t easily manipulate goddamned PDFs. No, ghostscript (gs(1)) does not count as ’easy.’ No, annotating something in evince(1) does not count. edit 2022-11-26: to be clear I just want what MacOS’ Preview can do, I’m not looking for a feature-to-feature Acrobat replacement.

As someone whose previous job title was “Digital Publishing Lead” in a major university library publishing program, turns out the generation, manipulation, and management of PDFs for publishing and archiving is really fucking important. Who’d have thought!?

With Void Linux and BSPWM I have a vaguely decent solution that involves me living mostly on the CLI—as I already do on MacOS. But as hard as I tried with Debian, Manjaro, and Arch, starting back in 2020 when i started to think about replacing my creeking 2013 MacBook Pro with a bad battery, I could never get it to work well enough. And I’ll never get the weekends and nights back I spent trying to get my custom keyboard layout to work correctly or prevent every program from creating a .foorc in my home directory. Especially things that MacOS places in ~/Library. Where it also sandboxes applications in a way that Linux can’t by default (have fun writting custom configs for firejail)! Not like the XDG Desktop Spec has been a thing since—oh idk—2003.

In sum, I’m really tired of Linux users taking every opportunity to give Mac users shit. I’m sorry you think it’s funny to try and make fun of shit like Macs only having USB-C ports and not USB-A anymore. That was relevant and true in 2016 but that was also seven years ago. It’s true that the switch to Apple Silicon (ARM 64) was a little rocky for a few people. It’s true that getting a version of NodeJS from like 2017 or Ruby from 2018 to work wasn’t easy at first. sometimes, that’s just how it is. Yeah the 2016-2017 keyboards were garbage, but that hasn’t been the case since then.

in sum: stop making fun of the choices made by people who know what the fuck they’re doing. people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Stop trying to get into editor pissing contests with each other. IDGAF that you use vim or vi or spacemacs. Good for you. Some people like BBEdit or—heaven forfend—use nano.

At the very fucking minimum, get some new material.

package mismanagement: mac homebrew

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

by popular demand, I am finally expanding on my occasional fediverse post about how terrible brew is for Mac OS package management.¹

But also, a few caveats:

I am a curmudgeon. I do not give a single fuck.
Don’t try to persuade me to use brew. see (1).

Many of the things that I am about to mention might have been fixed in the five years since I last installed and used it. I still don’t care. Like Manjaro the record is so bad that nothing is going to win back my trust.

I also maintain n, a version management tool for NodeJS on MacPorts, Signal-Desktop on Void Linux, and help update other packages for both projects as needed.

$ curl | sudo bash until you’re drunk

Let’s start out with installing homebrew following the default instructions²:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

it asks to elevate permissions to take over /usr/local and change ownership on everything
it clones the entire homebrew brew repository because they’ve apparently never heard of git’s --depth flag. what good does it do to have the ability to run brew 0.01?
it builds brew from source. Admittedly it relies on MacOS’ (ancient) builtins instead of requiring a full Xcode install—this is one advantage, at least when installing it.
it flashes a few messages about documentation—and oh also that it’s sending data to Google Analytics by default!³

$ hey google [analytics]

There is a lot of value in understanding what packages are getting used by which systems if you maintain packages. I have been known to look at the stats for Void’s Signal-Desktop package and MacPort’s n port. For the former, there are 12 Void machines running it, for n there have been 2 installations in the last long while, I think both of them are my machines.⁴

But the difference between the pretty basic stats that both Void and Macports have and the stats that Homebrew collects: homebrew acts as if it’s better to sin first and ask for permission later. MacPorts requires running sudo port load mpstats, Void requires installing popcorn and enabling the service.⁵ With both Void and MacPorts, you retain what I thought was a pretty basic principle of free and open source software: the ability to choose what happens on your machine.

Unlike on Void or MacPorts, Homebrew rolled out analytics silently. Instead of really handling the discussion well, it went about as poorly as you can imagine.⁶ And I’d bet the overwhelming majority of brew users still have no idea it’s happening—it’s an easy to miss message you see once! It also raises questions about the quality of the community that many of the people involved in that discussion are still there, ie., the person who added in gAnalytics originally.

$ brew install yolo

So now that we’ve got brew installed, what can you do? well, whatever you want! You don’t need to use sudo to actually install things! You’re a Power User, you know what you’re doing!⁷ Except when you don’t. We’ve all been there with an errant and disastrous off-by-one-keystroke command. For someone like me, using sudo is a little speedbump—a chance to make sure I’m sure. Brew, by making /usr/local (or /opt/brew on apple silicon) user writeable, hands you a RedBull and says ‘gun it.’

The question of whether or not it’s a risk in and of itself to make those folders user writable has been litigated enough already.⁸ I, obviously, think it’s a bad decision. More concerning is the fact that brew lets a lot of stuff in with what seems like little vetting. Hell, until 2021, you could get stuff automerged on github.

$ sudo port install sanity

So what’s my brilliant alternative? Well, duh, it’s MacPorts. Macports, which requires sudo. Macports, which deeply sandboxes its builds when installing from source.⁹ Macports, the one that has a small but tight-knit community of people who plain old give a shit in a way that the more corporate, emojified homebrew doesn’t.

yes, it requires a full Xcode install. Yes it will take up more space. yes, if you’re building from source it will pull in its own versions of whatever compiler you might need. But storage is cheap and you can do other things while xcode installs.

$ slip into some jorts

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention my friend june’s jorts system. jorts is beautiful and clever in its simplicity. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include a lot of things I use every day. But for a lot of people, I can imagine it’d might be enough.

There is a world in which I actually bother to fork jorts and run it using mercurial instead of git. but…only so many hours in the day.

edit: june mentioned quite rightly that the point of jorts is that she was tired of the shortcomings of pkgsrc, NetBSD’s ports system, hates the fact that brew doesn’t really manage dependencies very well (ie., it doesn’t track dependencies vs. requested packages), and as best I recall, disagrees with some of the choices MacPorts maintainers have made with packages she and I both use (e.g., MPV).

$ man -k ports

agree that Homebrew is terrible but Macports is too much and Jorts too minimalist? well, you have even more options!

pkgsrc which is NetBSD’s package manager but on MacOS and Linux
fink, the OG MacOS package manager which uses debian’s dpkg and apt on the backend. Pretty nifty but they’ve have trouble getting compatibility with > MacOS 10.15 working.
rudix which was brought to my attention today and looks pretty cool, unfortunetely it seems to be in decline, when judging by Github commits.

$ tldr post

Homebrew has sketchy security practices and runs google analytics by default. MacPorts doesn’t. Even if Macports doesn’t have everything I might want, the tradeoff between occasionally ‘just’ installing something with cargo or pip is fine.

$ exit 0

Just like Mercurial, MacPorts “lost.” That is to say, like git and fucking github, homebrew is so dominant that it is hard to imagine a world where it isn’t the default for 99% of people. For the short to medium term, it probably will be that way.

But fuck that. Use jorts. Use MacPorts.

a better world is possible.

annoyed! also furious!

Fri, 25 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m really annoyed!

people need to stop.

I’m annoyed by the software puritans who go on about “JavaS’creep” or “Micro$haft.” About their special browser extensions that they run in their fork of Firefox 27 that “protect” them from non-AGPL3 Javascript. It’s not browser fingerprinting or ads or whatever that’s the problem, it’s the particular software license!

I’m annoyed by the people—who use Arch, by the way—telling me how awful I am for primarily using MacOS (they dual boot Windows just for the games oh….and all of the things that still don’t have good Linux or *BSD equivalents).¹ ²

I’m annoyed by the tech bro “hardcore” Elon Twitter types, I’m annoyed by the people who look down on you if you’re not running Elastic Search with Kubernetes for some Rust webassembly POS. Or Elixir. Or worse.

I’m annoyed at the people in my own profession who insist that to display well formatted text on a screen you need a heavy duty Rails application, Postgres, Solr, and 5MB of Javascript to render a post the size of this one. “Modern” web development wasn’t the original cause of global climate change but it’s certainly not helping the situation.

I’m furious at the fact that you can’t buy a piece of electronics or install a piece of software without first wondering how that company is trying to make more money from your use of that product. I feel like an ass for saying this, but sometimes I watch in horror as people open apps on their phones which are really just wrappers that load their websites but with more efficient tracking built in.

But mostly I’m just furious about more or less everything.

[22:45:53] anelki@redfox /home/anelki
> covidate

   Today is...Friday, March 1000, 2020 at 22:45:54
   Let's make it a ✨great✨ day!

   Truly, we have learned nothing.

generated with covidate

it is the year of our lord 2022 and Linux still can’t easily manipulate goddamned PDFs. No, ghostscript (gs(1)) does not count as ’easy.’ No, annotating something in evince(1) does not count. edit 2022-11-26: to be clear I just want what MacOS’ Preview can do, I’m not looking for a feature-to-feature Acrobat replacement.

No, LibreOffice Draw does not count.
No, opening a PDF in Inkscape does not count.

If I wanted to add to my problems, I’d ~~try and install a sound card~~ err ~~try to maniuplate a PDF~~, try to find something more fun to do. ↩︎
FWIW I’m writing this on a Thinkpad T460s running Void Linux—where I am also a package maintainer. ↩︎

On leaving the WMATA Riders' Advisory Council

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It pains me to have had to bid adeiu to the WMATA Riders’ Advisory Council. At last week’s WMATA Board meeting, Chair Paul Smedberg elected to terminate my service after a single two year term. I regret it very much.

What follows below is an email I sent to members of the Arlington County Board on Sunday. As I doubt I’ll actually get a reply, I’ve decided to just post it here as it was an attempt to summarize why the RAC is important and more necessary than ever.

Dear Board Chair De Ferranti and Board Members Cristol, Garvey, and Karantonis:

I am writing to you all as the now former Chair of WMATA’s Riders’ Advisory Council (RAC).

In case you all are unfamiliar, the RAC exists to represent the interest of WMATA riders across the region, reporting directly to WMATA’s Board of Directors. I applied to join the RAC in December of 2018, shortly after the Board attempted to eliminate it. The Board appointed me in February of 2019. I was elected to serve as Virginia’s Vice-Chair in March of 2019.

As the child of a transit planner, my dad showed me how transit policy disproportionately affects lower-income families for better or worse. As director of planning at a municipal transit agency and later as a consultant working to establish community transit systems in rural and semi-rural Midwestern cities, he took the public input process seriously. I did more of my homework in community meetings and city council hearings than I did at home. I tried to bring the same determination to do right by riders (and in turn benefit WMATA) when I joined the RAC.

Instead of eliminating the RAC, the Board agreed to a series of reforms which included the appointment of a Board member to strengthen the dialog between the two. Your colleague and former WMATA (and NVTC) board member Christian Dorsey ‘served’ as first and to-date only Board Liaison. I place ‘served’ in quotation marks because he never attended a RAC meeting in person and after a few months of calling into our meetings and speaking for a few minutes before disconnecting the call ceased any further participation. Since June of 2019, the RAC had only one meaningful exchange with any board members: a meeting with Chair Smedberg in September of 2019.

During my term on the RAC and service as the Vice-Chair and Chair, I made it a priority to build on the work done by my predecessors to raise the RAC’s profile and make it an active participant in regional discussions about WMATA and transit policy. Lacking the promised guidance from the Board and determined to do right by the riders we represent, what choice did we have?

As the pandemic has raged on, it has become evermore clear how necessary a vocal, thoughtful, and diverse rider body is. Listening to essential workers I have come to see weekly, their frustration and fear is plain. WMATA has now passed four FY21 budgets and their failure to clearly communicate what changes each budget involved and when it takes effect has left them scrambling. People reliant on WMATA to get them from e.g., Suitland (Prince George’s County) to Virginia Square to work high risk hourly jobs for appallingly low wages in the midst of a uncontrolled global pandemic deserve far better.

Neither my former RAC colleague (and leading transit policy expert) Dr. Katherine Kortum or I were given a reason for why we were not reappointed to the RAC (see these stories from The Post or WAMU/DCist). I proudly stand behind every action I took and every statement I made. My only regret that WMATA’s Board and Staff were unwilling to engage with the same level of good faith that I attempted to engage them with. As Arlington’s elected leaders and members of the NVTC, I respectfully ask that you work with your colleague Paul Smedberg to establish meaningful powers for the RAC to solicit feedback from riders in semi-official ways (e.g., a booth near a Metrorail station entrance or convene a public listening session as has been done in the past) and the ability to request (and receive) written responses from WMATA staff on specific matters. We should not need to discuss filing a PARP (ie., FOIA) request to obtain what should already be public information.

Prior to the pandemic, WMATA had made encouraging progress reversing its ridership decline. But it had only achieved these gains in spite of itself. This region deserves so much better.

very sincerely yours,

anelki

messaging madness

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year I wrote a post called “email madness” about the generally alarming increase in the number of emails I receive per year. I was thinking about producing one of those posts again this year when a friend shared this post on XMPP (aka. Jabber) and IRC.

I’ve been on IRC for approximately a year and a half. I dabbled when I was a kid, but the ocean of networks was too vast, the waves of channels too deep, and the riptide of conversation flow (or lack thereof) too strong. I didn’t really spend much time on chat programs when I was in high school, just a little on LiveJournal.

Flash forward to 2020, I use:

Signal. Which I know is Problematic.
IRC: Four different networks and Bitlbee (connecting via my IRC client) for Discord, Slack, and XMPP (without OMEMO)¹
XMPP (Jabber)² with OMEMO encryption
WhatsApp (yes, I know)
iMessages/SMS
Briar (well, I have it installed, at least)

Oh and there’s also shit like Franz which is just a modified chromium browser that runs the web versions of several tragically popular services (Slack/Office365/etc). Just open a seperate browser window ffs.

Just as an exercise, here’s the number of people i talk to on a regular basis on each platform

Platform	‘Core’ People	Others
Signal	8	~20
IRC	5	~15
Discord (via IRC)	1	0
Slack (via IRC)	3	eh
XMPP	4	0
WhatsApp	2	0
iMessages/SMS	2	everybody else I guess?
Briar	0	0

IRC people being people I trade direct messages with.

To put it another way…

Bitlbee’s XMPP Module doesn’t support OMEMO encryption but instead supports OTR message encryption. OTR is kinda shit in comparison. OTOH when you’re on a server you control talking to another person on a server they control, the message is encrypted server to server. Unless the server is compromised, the message is functionally secure without OMEMO or OTR. ↩︎
how bad is your marketing that most people still call ‘XMPP’ ‘Jabber?’ Or don’t know what you mean until you say ‘Jabber?’ ↩︎

Have malicious SSH attacks increased since COVID-19 began? Yes.

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sometime in the middle of February, I started noticing a marked increase in failed SSH logins on my two servers. Using the program fail2ban, I have long blocked logins by IP addresses that attempt to use root, www-data, or similar generic logins via SSH. IPs are blocked for a full year. Root logins and password authentication are both disabled in the SSHD config. In other words: I’m the only one who can login, goddamnit.

In a normal 24hr period, there are on average 20-30 failed logins. By mid-February, I was getting 40-50. By early March, as many as 100. On the 7th, I went off to Code4Lib in Pittsburgh and new fails per 24hrs hit 150 per night. A few days after I got back from Pittsburgh, a torrent unleashed itself and new fails peaked ~500 per 24hrs around 2020-03-16. By the time I started tracking new fails per night on 2020-03-27, I had hit somewhere ~5500 total failed IPs in just over a month and a half. I began to think that the groups that engage in these kind of malicious login attempts were taking advantage of the outbreak of COVID-19, which was overwhelming and shocking and everything else. It’s a period I’ll never forget.

At midnight on the 27th, I took a deep gulp and unbanned every IP that’d been blocked. The first fail was maybe 20 seconds later. But at the same time, the rate of new fails slowed considerably from its peak earlier in March.

Methodology

What counts as a fail?

any attempt to use a password for SSH login
any attempt to login as root

While yes, both of those things are banned already in the SSHD config, but since fail2ban acts as a firewall of sorts, it’s a good thing to have. It also does much more than SSH. I picked SSH for this experiment because it’s the most logical vector of attack, if you’re attempting to hijack a machine.

anelki.net is the machine that runs this site and a few other things based on a Hetzner VPS in Germany. It was on Linode in Germany until the end of March when it moved to Hetzner.
wirefox is a VPN and Pi-Hole VPS on Linode near New York City.

Results

This is obviously only my microscopic corner of the web, so I’d be really interested in hearing from other people about this. My contact info is here.

	anelki.net	wirefox
Total Fails	4632	4298
Average Fails per 24hrs	145	134
Median Fails per 24hrs	141	146
Peak Fails on 2020-04-10	414	281

link to data (ODS, XSLX, and Numbers)

Pretty Charts

Total number of fails (Larger)

Number of new fails per 24hr reporting period (Larger)

internet friends

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Music: Thee More Shallows “2AM”

this post was completely rewritten on 2020-04-06

Back in the day, I wrote a livejournal. I still remember my username and I’ve gone back to look at it a few times. It’s just as embarrassing as you might expect.

But the one thing that I still think about from that time is the fact that I made some genuine (if indeed tenuous) friendships. And despite the fact that those days have long passed (15+ years, after all), those friendships are still valuable and have meaning. In some small way, they made me part of who I am today.

And all of our friendships do that to some degree or another. We might look back on things with different eyes, in my case with disgust or embarrassment. But things always look different after the fact.

I mention this because in autumn 2019, I started getting back into blogging again. I also started using internet relay chat (IRC). First through Code4Lib’s channel on Freenode, then ArchiveTeam’s channels on EFnet, and finally into the Tildeverse, a group of shared Linux/BSD servers for collaborative learning and exploration.¹

I’ve met some really cool folks in the tildeverse. Some folks are neighbors (/me waves at cm). Others have excellent taste in music (gb) and others are just awesome and have taught me a lot about sysadmin-ing (thanks, ben). And I can’t leave out js who’s one of my favorites. or favourites, she might perfer. They’re good folks and I’m very grateful to know all of them.

But one person is missing at a time when we need our ‘internet friends’ more than ever and that’s ynx. ynx was my first real friend on IRC, they made me feel welcome, they talked to me when I didn’t really know anyone else. When IRL things started to go a bit sideways, it was nice to have someone to just chat with.

I miss you, ynx. I think I know why you left tilde.chat and I understand. I know things are bad right now, the world is in a dark place and the forecast isn’t calling for sunshine anytime soon. But the thing about friends is that we help one another when the skies are gray. And I want you to know that I’m here for you, if you ever need it.

Just /msg me.

your friend,
anelki

This does seem a little bit silly to put out there like this. But such are the times.

Part of the deal with internet friends is that they can be ephemeral. Sad, but that’s just how it is, I guess.

But they don’t have to be.

the story of those came into being as told by their founder Paul Ford. And here’s the essay that pointed me to them. ↩︎

the cost of taking a walk

Tue, 31 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m extremely lucky to live where I live. In more normal times, I’m two blocks from a station on the Metro line that runs to my job, have plenty of grocery stores, drug stores, etc., live near beautiful parks, and am not far to fantastic trails and urban wilderness. During this…challenging…time, I am per order of the Hon. Ralph Northam, meant to stay as close to home as much as possible. In other words, walking down to Roosevelt Island or through Lubber Run park is probably not what the elected leader of the Commonwealth had in mind. That said, I do live in a rather beautiful (if you like older homes) and certainly walkable neighborhood. This will be fine.

Except…the number of Ring cameras in my neighborhood seems to grow daily. Especially at night when their pale blue eyes burn the brightest.

You know, Ring? The doorbells that do all sorts of fantastically creepy shite and Ring handles the mountains of data they generate in a thoughtful and caring way.

Nevermind the facial recognition. We’re living in the future! If the future was the early 1990s when video door bells first became a thing.

But I mention all of this because tonight, I noticed how I’d started reflexively dodging their gazes: “look left here, walk 20 feet, then look right, then you’re clear for a house.” Walking up one block near my own, I counted 7 on a standard block of maybe 12 houses? I guess I’ll avoid Norwood from now on. Or at least until the inevitable Spring power outage.

edit 2020-03-31 00:30

And how could I forget that for my first year of living here, I walked by a neighbor’s apartment door who had a similar thing that fit in her peephole that took a photo whenever it detected motion in the hallway.

life in mono

Sat, 28 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Music: Nine Inch Nails “Every Day is Exactly the Same”

Ausnahmezustand

When I lived in Austria my newspaper of choice was either Die Kurier (a solidly middle of the road and plainly written broadsheet) or Die Presse, a higher brow broadsheet that I read partially to put on airs of being deeply integrated in upper/middle class culture.¹ Part of my choice had to do with my working for a political party for a spell. But that’s another story for another time.

The editor of Die Presse is an especially witty writer by the name of Rainer Nowak whose daily newsletter during Austrian national elections I’ve long enjoyed (with no attempt to put on airs). So I was delighted–if one can be delighted by such a thing right now—to see his daily email show up every day since Austria began an effective lockdown two weeks ago.

I want to highlight a quote from today’s edition:

Wir werden diese Phase in unseren Leben nicht vergessen. Wir werden uns noch Jahre gegenseitig fragen: Wie hast du das damals erlebt? Wie ist es dir ergangen? Und dann wollen wir nicht antworten: Ich habe mich gefürchtet und immer beobachtet, ob die Nachbarn nicht vielleicht doch feiern. (Selbst wenn wir uns so gefühlt haben.) Und bitte zitiert jetzt niemand die letzten Drinks auf der Titanic. Wobei: Die Musik soll nicht so schlecht gewesen sein.

Or, my shite translation (it makes me sad to lose my German skills, yet I do nothing to stop it):

We will never forget this part of our lives. We will ask one another for years to come: “How did you experience this crisis? How did you get through it?” But we won’t want to answer: “I was afraid and always watched whether the neighbors were also miserable” (even if we felt that way). And no one should talk about the last drinks on the Titanic. The music probably wasn’t that bad.

We are all doing our best. For that, in these bizarre and extraordinary times, we should feel no shame.

Edit 2020-03-29:

Ich möchte eine Antwort geben, was ich am ende dieser Krise sagen will:

„Ich tat alles was möglich war, um diese schwere Zeit nicht nur durchzukommen, sondern sie zu erobern. Damit am ende war ich eine bewusstere Person geworden.”²

Oder anders gesagt…

At the end of this crisis, I want to be able to say:

“I did everything possible not just to make it to the other side of this crisis, but to overcome it. So that at the end I had become a more conscious person.”³

Die Kurier and Die Presse both have fascinating origin stories, the former having been founded by the US Army in 1945 and the later being the German speaking Habsburg Empire’s leading liberal-nationalist organ during the Revolutions of 1848. ↩︎
Not to venture too deeply into psychoanalysis here, but the feeling I’m going for here is of a person who is more kind or compassionate, thoughtful, and conscious of the world around them. I’m not sure exactly how to describe that. In German or English. Spelling it out like that I did in the previous full sentence isn’t doing it for me. On the other hand, my original use of the phrase „bessere Person“ (better person) isn’t doing it for me either. ↩︎
See above. ↩︎

pandemic times

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In my tiny little plastic box
Where caffeine is the only drug
The doors and windows never open
Something contagious could come up

-Hundreds “Happy Virus”

fate

To be perfectly honest, by the time I came back from Pittsburgh I had kind of resigned myself to the idea that I would, at some point in the coming months, contract Covid-19. Despite being a consistent handwasher, despite taking every precaution, despite doing what I thought would be enough, I’d get it.

Last Friday I started feeling lethargic with a dry cough. My chest began to tighten up. I had a headache that no matter what just wouldn’t go away. Stomach cramps and a fever consistently around 100.5-102° F. By Sunday, it was bad enough that I called Kaiser Permanente’s advice line and was scheduled for a video visit the next day with my primary care physician. Dr. Egan designated me a ‘presumptive positive’ (I’m in a higher risk group to boot) and arranged for me to be tested three hours later. Because as a ‘presumptive positive,’ I’m not supposed to take public transportation, I had to find a car (or walk) to the testing site. I’m very grateful for my friend Stephen, who loaned me his and for people staying the hell home. That was the easiest drive I’ve ever had in this area. Though the person who honked at me for going the speed limit in DC’s Center Leg Freeway tunnel (the one that runs under the National Mall) can go to hell.

I received my test results just today and with them the news that I have tested negative. Apparently there’s another strain of the flu that bears many of the same symptoms currently circulating. Great timing buddy.

Still feel like shite though. Though that probably has something to do with the fact that I’ve spent very little time not on my sofa this week.

luck

I am extremely lucky in all of this. Lucky because of the fact that my symptoms have been fairly mild. Lucky because I have access to an excellent, well integrated group of physicians, and especially because I have a primary care doctor with whom I’ve built a deeply trusting relationship. This is to say nothing of the fact that I was lucky that I could even get a test.

gratitude

A lot of people have helped me adjust to this bizarre reality we now inhabit. And I want them to know that am grateful from the very bottom of my heart.

an apology

For the folks I notified at the beginning of the week, I am deeply sorry for any distress this may have caused. As we all cope with this bizarre and uncertain time, let’s remember to be especially kind to one another. We’re all in this together.

now. go wash your fucking hands, please.

let Powernerd help

the current crisis

Sun, 22 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

at a loss for words

I’ve been trying in the past few days to come up with a way to describe the situation we find ourselves in. It was foreseeable back in January, all things considered. When “The Virus” (this is all anyone talks about nowadays and always as “The Virus”) spread from China to other parts of the world—South Korea then Japan then Italy and then Seattle!—it still hadn’t quite hit. Even as it became clear in early March that the situation in the US was rapidly deteriorating, it still occupied very little mental space (a consequence of Trump era desensitization, I think). I went off to Code4Lib 2020 in Pittsburgh on the 7th of March, I gave some consideration to skipping (the whole thing is live streamed) but never seriously. An email from the organizers about Covid-19 that I saw while I was on the Metro to Union Station gave me pause, but when I bought my train ticket, I felt like I was doing the right thing.

But here is what I mean by a loss for words: from stepping on to the MARC train in DC on Saturday the 7th to Tuesday night (the 10th) and walking by a TV with CNN on in the lobby of the hotel, I was totally focused on the conference. Sure there were some conversations about it, mainly “oh yeah her institution just banned travel so she couldn’t make it” or “sorry, not shaking hands right now” But you’re in a ballroom with 300 people, many of whom I admire, respect, enjoy talking to, etc. Even on Twitter, I almost always had my twitter “libtech” and “#c4l20” tabs open in twterm. The rest of the world could frankly go to hell.

Until I froze in the lobby that Tuesday night, glued to CNN.

The magnitude of this crisis ahead finally hit, like a cast iron skillet to the face. I still have not truly grappled with it. It’s just too much to deal with. To say nothing, of course, of the paranoia and hypochondria that grips us all.

the world hangs together by a thread

This crisis has done more to magnify the fact that our “system” is profoundly fragile. I don’t mean this in a Marxist economic sense, but simply that the supply chains that make the materials that we depend on. Testing swabs to collect mucus samples for Covid-19 from Italy, plastic valves for ventilators from Japan or China or Taiwan, medications made in a factory near New Delhi. And at this very moment with the world in crisis and shortages of medical equipment and supplies more and more acute, the supply chains that provide the goods and services we need to maintain what we might call normal life seem on the verge of snapping.

With the St. Louis Federal Reserve predicting as much as 30% unemployment, is it any wonder I’ve been sleeping so poorly the past few weeks?

With that all said, there’s a very real chance that the resulting recession is mostly temporary. But that doesn’t especially matter if small businesses are wiped away in scores, if landlords go bankrupt and more and more real estate falls into the hands of private equity groups, it’s not the United Airlines or McDonalds of the world that are at risk here, it’s Buzz Bakery or Alto Fumo or Cafe Mozart. To say nothing of the fact that our hollowed out social welfare system (such as it is) is totally incapable of handling such a massive influx of the suddenly jobless. But don’t worry, we’re all going to get $1200 checks(!) which will barely cover most folks’ rent, especially in the hardest hit areas along the coasts.

What is the point of doing this—any of this? A massive portion of the population is on the verge of absolute destitution and half of the political class is looking for an excuse to shovel hundreds of billions to airlines and chain restaurants. The other half can’t be bothered to embrace a proposal that is actually significant enough to address the problem. Perhaps the scale is too much for the members of the Senate.

wash your fucking hands

I don’t know what else I can say or if any of this is coherent. I wrote this mainly for a vague sense of catharsis.

So I’m going to close with an excerpt from Carmen Maria Machado’s “Inventory” from her collection Her Body and Other Parties (find in a library or in an indie bookshop) that I reread the other day:

One woman. Brunette. A former CDC employee. I met her at a community meeting where they taught us how to stockpile food and manage outbreaks in our neighborhoods should the virus hop the firebreak.

…

Afterward, she traced the indents in my skin from the harness, and confessed to me that no one was having any luck developing a vaccine. “But the fucking thing is only passing through physical contact,” she said. “If people would just stay apart—” She grew silent. She curled up next to me and we drifted off.

We can’t see beyond this crisis. No one knows how long it will last, just that it will be a while yet. My prediction to my boss that I’d see him in June now feels optimistic.

The only thing we can know for certain is that this will eventually end, even if we don’t know when.

Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt.

burnt out lightbulb

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

‘Cause every footstep was a lifetime passed
Every pin prick left an autograph
Sign the old familiar photograph
Too old to last
Too young to fall apart
Too young to fall apart
Too young to fall apart
Too young to fall apart

–Lane 8 “Yard Two Stone”

we don’t talk about burnout enough in the US. It’s just something that people who are lucky enough to have health insurance and therapists ever talk about. And even then, doesn’t mean the situation gets any better. It might even get worse.

Working where I do, I am extremely lucky in a lot of ways. I have a great bunch of mentors (hi WG, WM, DK…). I have a lot of freedom to make mistakes as long as I’m learning from them.

But burnout is real and something everyone should take a moment to reflect upon.

I mention this for a few reasons, not least of which is that doing two jobs for the last few months has worn me down, that I’ve pulled back from a lot of my non-work commitments (e.g., WMATA’s Riders’ Advisory Council), and that I’m getting on a good night ~5.5hrs sleep. This has been detrimental to my life overall and has had some serious negative consequences that will be with me for a very long time to come. There’s also the risk of spiralling, something I’m personally terrified of happening.

There’s a quiz going around tech twitter and similar strata to measure burnout amongst tech and tech-adjacent people. I didn’t give them any personally identifiable information but they do have some helpful questions to ask yourself at the end that I copied down for future reference.

I mention this because my burnout score was 5.4/6. And it has left me with a lot of questions to think about right now. First and foremost: how to stop it from hitting 5.5.

I shared it in the Code4Lib IRC and may try to get a group together in Pittburgh to talk about it. For Library people, it’s something we definitely need to talk about and for LibTech folks, that goes triple. There’ll be a meeting at my house tomorrow at 2:00pm.

The topic? “How to not be like me and let it get as far as it has.”

no other way but forward

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It feels tough to admit this, I guess. But especially in such a public way. Alas.

Coding makes me anxious. I’m still very much an amateur, despite using it at work. I have a lot to learn and seemingly little time to work on it (for a lot of complicated reasons almost all to do with the pile of hats I’m wearing right now).¹

That means I don’t have a lot of time to focus and actually learn stuff. I used to spend some time on the weekends doing stuff and joining the Tildeverse (I’m on ~team) has helped a lot too (here’s looking at you, ynx, gbmor, ben, jess, and june). If for no other reason than it’s being an encouraging kind of place where asking for help and fucking up are both okay.

But I’m writing this because I wrote a script today to replaces some aliases in my fish configuration for internet radio stations I really like. And for the first time, it felt kinda natural, like I knew what the fuck I was doing.²

So here it is.

It’s simple and it just does a very simple thing, but it’s mine.

And yes, I do use a cowsay fox to tell me stuff and call me chief. Her name is Beate and I’ll brook no snarkiness here…

I am reminded of this book for some reason. ↩︎
A fleeting feeling for me in any domain of human endeavor… ↩︎

email madness

Sun, 02 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Too much. It’s really become all too much.

Since I started using DevonThink last year I dump all of my email from the previous month into two databases, one for work email and one for personal email. When I went to do this yesterday, I decided it would be much more helpful if I created subgroups for each year of email. So, I decided to split out all of the pre-2015 email from the main database and stored it in a few safe places.¹ All fine and good.

But this made me realize the frankly kinda shocking fact that my email volume has grown enormously in the past few years. Not just because of starting a full-time job, but my personal email especially.

In other words, that’s an increase of 1590%(!!) in personal email since 2015 and a much more modest 15% on work email. For January 2020, I’m at 1988 personal emails and 1291 work emails. Assuming the rest of the year is about the same rate, at current I’ll get around 23,856 personal emails and 15,492 work emails. Shattering last year’s record by 8,282 more emails.

This is, pardon me, fucking madness.

What the hell happened to reach this point? Well, I have a few theories.

Newsletters and Notifications.

I’ve made the mistake of signing up for a lot of email newsletters, most of which are just marked as read and ignored.

Some leading offenders:

The Washington Post email@washingtonpost.com: 720 (2018), 1170 (2019)
Richmond Times-Dispatch no-reply@richmond.com: 239 (2018), 508 (2019)
GitHub (new versions and discussion in watched repos) notifications@github.com: 132 (2018), 262 (2019)

My Fear of Missing Out (aka FOMO) is itchy AF. You get the idea.

I’ve ended up on too many promo lists.

Admittedly, since creating a domain that allows me to use anything in front of the @ sign (e.g., foo@bar.net), it has allowed me to sign up for things without thinking.

I just have so so so much more to do. sigh

The worst part maybe is that as a person who really likes having an empty inbox, I do get a little antsy when that’s not the case. That’s been harder and harder to achieve. So now I’m at the point if it’s an email that I’d otherwise ignore and mark as read, I’m finally gonna just unsubscribe. The only way I can even begin to process all of this is the 48 different sorting rules I use with Fastmail (referral link) to create a vague sense of order.

But this is absolute madness. I’m too connected and it’s not just email: Slack, Signal, IRC, Twitter (hell site that it is), SMS, it’s godforsaken madness. During the day I charge up my phone at work but hide it under my monitor stand so I don’t even think about it. I’ve forgotten to take it home a few times and am probably better off for it, in anycase.

Nevertheless, something’s gotta give. This is just…

YIKES.

cough someone’s a data hoarder cough See also. ↩︎

PTSD and Youtube

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

CW: Discussion of Saddam Hussein and PTSD

Who remembers 2006? I sure do. As evidenced by my first post, obviously I do.

Who remembers when Saddam Hussein was executed? I remember that too.

It was a late Friday night. I used to read Daily Kos several times a day and that day was certainly no exception (this may seem like a long walk to my point but stick with me). It was also the first time, I think, that I visited YouTube. Daily Kos had posted a flash about the execution late that Friday night.

Why does this stick with me? Because buried in the comments was a link to YouTube of an illicit cell phone video of the act iself. It scarred me a little, had it not it’s possible I’d have been able to forget it.

Now, you’re probably thinking “what the hell does this have to do with anything?” Because YouTube (and Facebook and Twitter and and and…) content moderators are getting PTSD.

Casey Newton has the deets:

Content moderators for YouTube are being ordered to sign a document acknowledging that performing the job can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to interviews with employees and documents obtained by The Verge. Accenture, which operates a moderation site for YouTube in Austin, Texas, distributed the document to workers on December 20th — four days after The Verge published an investigation into PTSD among workers at the facility.

Go read the whole thing, please.

cheat sheets

Fri, 24 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I thought it might be helpful for folks who (quite reasonably) don’t want to login to Red Hat’s opensource.com to share their collection of cheat sheets. Or at least the ones I’ve grabbed.

These come in handy in a pinch, especially given the varied quality of what you can find on Stack Exchange.

I’ve put them up on my Nextcloud instance here.

WARC me up, Scotty

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

To say that I’m paranoid about backups is like saying…well, it’s hard to find a point of comparison that’s fulsome enough. I keep everything. I have archives of old MacOS installers on a RAID drive at home. Yes, I’m aware you can get them from Apple, the question being how long that’ll last. I have TimeMachine Backups going back to ~2009.

Why? As another post I’m working on will suggest, it’s about privacy and about control. Privacy in the sense that I don’t feel like it’s possible to trust the platforms that the present age seems to mandate we rely on. And, for the same reasons the good folks at ArchiveTeam have outlined:

Because they don’t give a fuck about your data. Except insofar as they can monetize it.
Because they will delete your wedding photos. This is a reference to Anil Dash’s The Web We Lost which everyone should watch. Do it. Right now. Then read the rest of this, please.

My interest in preserving my stuff—no matter how worthless it may seem—also dovetails nicely with the web archiving projects I have going at work, e.g., the blog of our long time provost, Peter Stearns.

Web archiving as I practice it, the process of making a snapshot of a website in a format that preserves its accessibility and usability. The folks at ArchiveTeam have done a lot on this front, e.g., recent projects to grab as much of Yahoo! Groups as possible before it was too late. Verizon blocked them, just as they did with Tumblr. Just thought I’d post a little note about this for convenience sake.

I use wget to do this because it’s super simple and baked right in to standard Linux/MacOS. It does have its limitations. These wget commands will produce a warc file for which you’ll need a warc player. You can grab something like Webrecorder or Webrecorder Player to browse the captured site. You can also browse the site files directly: wget will capture the individual files in addition to making the warc.

It’ll take however long it takes, obviously it just depends on how big the site is. Something like this site mostly text and built with a static site generator like Hugo takes less than 30 seconds. Database driven sites like those which use Wordpress can be much larger. There’s also the speed of your internet connection and computer to factor in to the mix. One recent example—the Washington Metro’s site took about a week and came out to ~36GB. And that was running 24/7 on a 1 Tbps connection on a pretty snappy machine at work.

Using `wget` for web archiving

Generally, you can use:
wget -pkrm --warc-cdx --warc-file=foo -e robots=off https://foo.org

-p collects the prerequisites for the page/site

-k converts the links to make them work locally

-r captures the site recursively
this is especially useful when you have a site with a funky configuration that throws wget off. Not thinking of any Netscape founders/famous devs, JAMIE. Should that happen while using foo.org might not work, but using foo.org/bar/ might.

-m mirrors the site/structure etc.

-e executes an option as if it was in your .wgetrc

--warc-cdx creates an index file for the WARC file

You can also add this stuff to your .wgetrc in your home folder.

progress=bar
robots=off
random_wait=on
mirror=on
recursive=on
verbose=on
user_agent=Mozilla

If you’re using Windows for this, I’ll refrain from giving you the JWZ treatment but I’ve got no fucking clue how to use wget on Windows. Sorry. Maybe switch to something that’s not as fucking creepy as Windows has become.¹

Not sorry even a little tiny bit. ↩︎

privacy. fucking. matters.

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

CW: brief allusions to violent crimes near the bottom of the post

“What does it matter if I have your location pings?! We delete them after 24 hours!”

privacy. fucking. matters.

We live in an age where privacy should be more important than ever. An age when we have the technologies to track and surveil with alarming precision. And that all exists in a regulatory framework that is—to put it as mildly as possible—totally fucking incapable of protecting the privacy of the average citizen. We should all be furious. Instead, we’re on Facebook.

As I noted in my first post, the Overton Window has shifted dramatically since 2006 with the emergence of social media sites as a daily feature of our lives. The defensive posture that most people held on this topic—or claimed to hold, at least—melted away.

There is no more dangerous development and no area in need of a strict legal framework that protects end user privacy, especially in the US.

More than perhaps any other factor, the rise of the smartphone may be the tool that made this all possible.

the spy in your pocket

I opened my first checking account at the US Employees Oklahoma City Federal Credit Union a few days after my 18th birthday. One of the first purchases I made after receiving my debit card a few weeks later was a new wallet. The guy who sold it to me at Penn Square Mall was someone who was “Myspace famous.” For some reason, I remember his posting about going to the Apple Store in the mall to check his Myspace. But smartphones changed that. We could be connected to these networks all the time and fill the gaps with them. The biggest thing that Myspace lacked wasn’t something that Myspace had much control over. Myspace lacked a way to become a constant part of your life. Facebook (which opened itself to mass registration in 2006) was rising just as the iPhone was announced in 2007. Facebook was able to become an early and significant part of the mobile landscape. It was always right there, whenever you wanted to “connect” with your friends.

At the same time, these devices have become effectively essential to most peoples’ lives. During the week of 13 January, I’m planning to make an effort to use my phone less than 30 minutes each day. But I’m not like most people. Most people don’t think about it or maybe they just don’t care, even if they do think about it. Maybe it just never occurs to them.

going off to/at #transpo20

The thing that finally got me to write this post was a conversation I had at Transportation Camp.

Some of the richest and most dangerous data your phone can provide is your location. It’s also a permission that’s frequently requested by apps that shouldn’t really need it. My credit union’s mobile banking app does not need to access to my location. If I really need to find the nearest branch or ATM, I’m perfectly capable of putting in a city name or postal code, thanks! The same for almost every other app that asks for it. None of them really need unrestricted access to this information.

As it happens, it’s also a rich source of data for transit software. And while I imagine most of the people in this field who want access to this information have the best intentions to only use it for arrival time calculations or similar, their attitudes discussing it betray a fundamental lack of concern for user privacy: it’s not the fact that you claim to delete the data after 24hrs, no exceptions. It’s the fact that the data exists. It’s the fact that it is created. Because you’re not the only one trying to get it.

How do I know that if I give you this data, it stays with you? Or that there’s not another app also leaking my location to somewhere else? How do I know that you’re actually using the data they way your privacy policy says you do? I don’t. I can’t know for sure. And I have no good reason to trust you. Or, in a rather disgustingly capitalistic view of things, support your efforts to make money by giving you my data for free.

During a tense session hosted by Transit (it’s an app) and Lyft, ominously titled “We’re Watching You, and That’s a Good Thing” (you really can’t make this shite up, folks) this all kind of came to the fore.

One of the Transit folks started asking some questions about how many people wouldn’t trust them with their data. 80% of people put as hand up. Apple? About the same. Google? 90% plus me putting both hands up.

This obviously took them by surprise.

One person whom I only know as “Kevin,” was incredulous that people wouldn’t share their data to improve transit ETAs:

What does it matter if I have your location pings?! They’re deleted them after 24 hours!

Because, Kevin, the issue isn’t that you may delete it. It’s that I can’t trust you or any other app on my phone to truly protect my privacy. It’s that you’re asking for this data. And for me to give it to you, it must first come into existence. I’d really just prefer it never came into existence in the first place. I want to be able to exist in the world without the feeling that I’m being tracked. Not least by a $500 metal and glass brick in my back pocket. The obvious solution “smash your phone and throw it into the Potomac at high tide” is one that few people would dare consider and fewer still would carry it out.

During the Lyft/Transit session, they passed around the microphone to folks who wanted to explain why they wouldn’t trust Transit and Lyft with their data. I was one of the last folks to speak. I’m sorry to say, I don’t remember what precisely I said. I just remember that Kevin didn’t like it.

Not just smartphone pings but SmarTrip taps

DC’s regional transit agency (WMATA) also collects significant amounts of granular data from every customer who uses a registered card to pay for their journeys. As WMATA Metrorail charges fares based on the length of a journey and when it is taken, an enormous amount can be discerned from that data alone.

As a case in point: a customer taps into Vienna-Fairfax every weekday at 8:30am and taps out at Union Station some time later. Then, they tap in at Union Station at 5:45pm and tap out at Vienna-Fairfax. Given that data alone, you can already begin to form a judgement about who they might be, what profile they fit, etc. If you toss in a bus trip on either or both of those rail trips, you can at least get an idea of where they live based on the AM bus trip from the stop close to their house to Vienna-Fairfax. See? Don’t even need the address. But drawing on demographic data from near the bus stop, you can figure out even more about them. Are they a cashier at Sweetgreen? Or are they the mid-30s Biglaw associate who orders falafel every Wednesday? Now, buy some data from some shady data broker and toss it all in a Blendtec. Boom. Figured you out Josh McMahan, Associate at White Shoe Legal, LLP. Enjoy falafel day tomorrow, sign up for our emails and we’ll send you a coupon for 50¢ off your order!

You probably think this song is about you, Kevin (it is, lol)

At the end of the day, the folks from Transportation Camp all migrated around the corner to a bar for drinks/dinner. I had resigned myself to the fact that my sparring with Kevin had concluded, but fate had another thing yet in store.

After dinner and a few beers with some old and new friends, I spotted Kevin making the same case to a delightfully skeptical looking urban planner from a major planning firm. At last, we could argue less than 20 feet apart.

Standing there, listening to him run through the same hackneyed “We all want better transit arrival data, so lemme have yours!” that he’d made several times during several sessions. It dawned on me: “this dude has no empathy.”

So I tried a different tact. I tried to explain that someone who is the victim of abuse or sexual assault may have issues with just anyone taking their data. Then I moved on to the fact that at least three trans women of color were murdered in the DC area last year. Given that, maybe members of the Trans or the broader LGBTQ community might not want to just give up their location or any other data. Because, Kev, people are different from you. The calculus around public safety is different. Who these people can trust is different. They are not a self described “normal, 50-something, straight white dude.”

mumble “Thank you for educating me” mumble, he said, as he turned away to the person on his other side.

Big Data, Little Ethics?

I used to know someone who worked at a software company, and through them, a fair number of data scientists. I have the privilege of working with a great data scientist on a number of projects at work.

The thing that both my friend at the software company (but not their coworkers) and my colleague have mentioned is something that always bounces into my consciousness when issues like this come up:

Most data science people don’t remember that the data represents people. It’s just numbers. It’s just something to manipulate with their slick R or Stata skillz.

And this is the problem in a nutshell.

You might be trustworthy, Kevin, but not everyone is. And I resent that you think I should trust you by default. I resent that about any of these companies.

The default has become to share far more than anyone ever needs to know. But Kevin, be happy! We’ll know with 0.2% more certainty that the bus will arrive only 28 seconds behind schedule.

What the fuck have we already given up? And where are we going? Nowhere good. This bus goes straight to a hell of our own devices.

Building a Personal Memex

Fri, 03 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Life in the Devonian Era

I am a data hoarder. I have personal emails going back to 2004. Some papers from undergrad, lots of stuff from my time in Austria, and more stuff besides. This is all to say nothing of my grad school work, thesis, etc. etc. etc. There’s a reason my 8TB NAS only has 1.5TB still free. I also have a lot of current stuff to manage and in a growing number of text and non-text formats.

Until recently, I relied pretty heavily on a 200gb Google Drive for storage of “current” materials. For notes I used Joplin or Markor as appropriate. But my increasing determination to liberate myself from the FAANGS meant that it was time shake things up.¹

So I moved my cloud storage to Tresorit and my email to Fastmail (referral link). But this still left something to be desired.

Enter DevonThink. DevonThink is a personal database system akin to Yojimbo or Symphytum, etc.. Except on steroids and a liter of RedBull.

DevonThink has some powerful tools baked in, e.g., ABBYY FineReader for OCR. It does a really good job indexing and identifying connections between documents and emails, between tags and keywords. It can capture local copies of web pages, RSS feeds, etc. Neat, right?

But there’s something missing: web history.

Send in the [History] Hounds

Web history is a funny thing: we don’t want anyone else to have it (hi Google) but it can be extraordinarily useful for keeping track of things you forgot to bookmark or send to Pinboard or whatever.

History Hound creates a searchable index of your web history across multiple browsers. If you sync this stuff e.g., via Firefox Sync, it gets that stuff too.² It also integrates with NetNewsWire to index your RSS feeds! This is a brilliant idea.

But if you’ve got DevonThink on one hand and HistoryHound on the other, how can you make them talk to one another? Well, a quick email to History Hound’s developer reveals there is a way to get it to dump out your web history index. Hooray! But wait, the next issue is that History Hound’s output is in UTF-16LE and the resulting file doesn’t render well. My first export was after a month of using it and the file was ~50mb of text. Three or so months in and the export was 120mb. Yikes!

So I noticed two things that should’ve been obvious at first, 1. HH exports to HTML and 2. the file encoding is wrong or at least it’s not UTF-8. But there’s a solution.

Bless This Mess

Here’s how to export then cleanup your History Hound index for archiving:

Window>Index Status (or just ⌘3)
Option+click Clear Index
Save the file as foo.html
Running file foo.html should produce something like HTML document text, Little-endian UTF-16 Unicode text, with very long lines
Then iconv -f UTF-16LE -t UTF-8 foo.html >> foo_utf8.html

Et voila! Dump into DevonThink. The resulting file should be ~50% smaller and opening it in DevonThink (or a plain old browser) will give you a delightful and searchable plain-text index you can file away in DevonThink.

It’s a nice way to make two great pieces of software work together even better.³ And another way to add to my growing Memex.

2020-01-22 Update: UTF-8!

As noted by @StClairSoft after this was posted a few weeks ago, the new version now uses UTF-8 so you can save a bunch of steps above. Give their stuff a look. It’s good stuff. And indie developers like them need/deserve all the support they can get.

Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google and their ilk. ↩︎
Caution should be taken to use History Hound’s domain filter settings, especially if you sync between a work and personal machine. ↩︎
Other examples include MailMate’s very powerful integration with DT. ↩︎

stray thought re: nostalgia

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Just a stray thought re Thursday night’s post on nostalgia that’s probably better kept to myself.

When you interview for a job, most people put their best foot forward, or try to anyway. When I interviewed for my current job in 2017, I know I did. But the one thing that continues to strike me is the volume of everything there is to do. How can you get to the projects/goals/ideas you’d mentioned on interview day when you’re using 40+hrs a week to keep things moving?

This is obviously (I hope) not meant as a criticism of my employer. I have a great boss/mentor and excellent coworkers. But I don’t know if there’s anything they could’ve said to prepare me for the past ~1.75 years.

The best thing you can do is keep moving forward: schau nach vorne.

As we enter the last week of the semester and let things wind down for a few weeks until the new year:

„Laßt uns gehen mit frischem Mute in das neue Jahr hinein! Alt soll unsere Lieb und Treue, neu soll unsere Hoffnung sein!“

The song doesn’t translate clearly but basically:

“Let’s enter the new year with fresh courage and pure hearts! Our love and loyalty should be old but refreshed with new hope!”

Every day this year yet to be, every day next year is a day full of the potential to make a meaningful difference.

If I’d said that in my interview, I don’t know what my search committee would’ve thought, but it’s maybe the truest thing I could’ve said.

Happy last week of the semester to one and all. auf gehts!

nostalgia, or, _„Zeiten wie diese“_

Thu, 12 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

in which I attempt to thread some needles

I am by nature a very nostalgic person. I have vivid memories of things most people would—I hope—forget. To make matters worse, I’m the kind of person most people would describe as an “old soul,” I’m increasingly cautious of new technology, developments, flashy political candidates, untested policy, I could go on and on.

It’s maybe part of why I studied history and political science as an undergrad. And wrote a thesis that almost included an additional chapter on the strange beauty of the Austrian Empire and the potential it had to transform itself into a modern consolidated multinational state.¹ An act of counterfactual self-indulgence, but it was my thesis and my advisor was generous in humoring me on projects like that. It’s more due to running out of time than anything else that it’s not in there now.

If my previous post was about the fact that the internet/technology, etc., has changed in a profound and unfortunate way, this is just a note of further reflection. In a way, I feel a little like I imagine Janus must feel. Always looking simultaneously forward and backward. At least when you’re looking forward and backward, you can still close your eyes for a minute. I don’t have that choice when I think about where I was, where I am, and where I’m going.

während „Zeiten wie diese“

I’m writing very very late on 2019-12-12. Today is exactly two years since I flew to Dulles airport and was met by my now colleague and then search committee chair to interview for the job I am very fortunate to have now, but I never thought I’d end up here. The night before my interview, I went for a very long walk along the Potomac Tidal Basin to see the FDR memorial. I figured that I wasn’t going to get the job and so I wanted to see it. The weather was horrible with a cutting north wind. Despite my gloves, my hands were chapped and bleeding.

Last year on this date, I went on the same walk and, yes, my hands bled again. I had planned to do it again tonight.

For better or worse, I didn’t do it tonight because I was at an event. And then I ate dinner with friends. One might think “oh, it’s a sign that I feel like I belong here now!” But no, still haven’t found it.

I don’t know what it feels like to be comfortable somewhere, I don’t know what it feels like to belong somewhere. And I can’t quite shake the feeling that I might never feel that way, anywhere. I’ll keep looking backward and forward. Maybe I’ll find it on another Very Long Walk someday.

The most challenging thing you or I can do, ever more challenging in „Zeiten wie diese“ is to look forward, with hope to achieve our world and not the world we fear.² Let’s all do what we can. There’s not much else we can do.

I’m using the term “consolidated state” in the sense of Charles Tilly in his 1975 essay “Reflections on the History of European State-Making.” ↩︎
To borrow the phrase from Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, available in libraries and fine indie bookshops everywhere. ↩︎

the_series_of_tubes

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 21:05:23 -0400

the internet is a series of tubes

Between my 18th birthday in 2006 and my 20th in 2008:

thefacebook became just Facebook
Twitter was founded (and I’ll never forget thinking what a horrible idea it was hearing this on NPR).¹
Youtube came into being and was bought by Google.²
Amazon Web Services releases its first product, AWS S3.
The iPhone was introduced (and to everyone’s shock and horror, didn’t support ~~Macromedia~~ Adobe Flash. It was a big deal, trust me.³
The first public specification of HTML5 came out in early 2008. Google Chrome followed a few months later.⁴

I mention all this because it was 2006 when Ted Stevens, the late senior senator from Alaska declared the internet to be a “Series of Tubes.”⁵ Between that speech, the music video remixes, and Adam Sandberg+Chris Parnell’s Lazy Sunday, we were off to the races.⁶ And, oh yeah, Time Magazine made “You” the person of the year, complete with a shiny cover that was supposed to look like a mirror.⁷ AKA, the last time Time had much of any meaningful influence on the Zeitgeist.

It’s a strange thing, how much we (as a society) just kinda all jumped into this morass, myself (shamefully) included. I remember the September 2006 boycott across the US with college students upset about Facebook’s introduction of the newsfeed.⁸ And then, later that same month, when FB opened itself up to anyone.⁹ “MTV U,” which blared in the dining halls across Oklahoma State University, gave it all a fair bit of coverage. But both incidents were seemingly forgotten in a week.

So we started posting our photos and our whatever, loading it all into FB. And then Google Drive. And Instagram. You get the idea. Whereas in the second iteration of the net (roughly 1994?-2006?) folks would talk about how concerned they were about privacy, people started shoveling data into the social media machine. Time’s 2006 article naming “You” the person of the year framed it thus:

The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

While also noting:

Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred. But that’s what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There’s no road map for how an organism that’s not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It’s a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who’s out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you’re not just a little bit curious.

Yeah. We sure did beat the pros at their own game. Uh huh. The final victory of democracy and privacy over unrestrained capitalism. How could anyone forget Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin, et al. raising the white flag over Palo Alto?

Nope. Instead, in doing all of this, we abandoned a lot of what makes computers great and useful. We moved everything to platforms in the cloud, these great new “free” services.¹⁰ It didn’t occur to most folks, myself included, that customer “analytics,” basically, tracking how much time you spend on a given service (or worse, tracking cookies that tell Facebook/Google etc. which sites you’re visiting), is how they’re actually making their money. Why yes, I do feel like an idiot after writing that.

And so that’s where we are.

You’re probably saying, “well no shit, Sherlock. You just now figured it out? What took you so long?” which is a fair question.

If this blog is really anything, it’s just an attempt to piece together some thoughts I’ve had rolling around in my head for a while now. About privacy. About technology. Probably occasionally also about WMATA, aka Washington DC’s regional transit agency.

It’s about a world that is moving far far far too fast for the cognitive bandwidth of most engaged citizens.

At least it’s not Twitter, I guess.

“…and if you liked this post, please don’t forget to share it on Twitter, Facebook, and Panopticon…”

WMATA rac-attac: september '19

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Without much in the way of introduction, I’m posting the September 2019 WMATA Riders’ Advisory Council Report. This one is one of three I’ve written in the past few months.

Fiscal Year 2021 Budget

The RAC is grateful for the chance to consult on the coming FY 2021 budget at such an early point in the budget process. To that end, we had the pleasure of hearing from Yetunde Olumide, Vice President of the Office of Management and Budget Services.

The Riders’ Advisory Council agrees with the broad principles outlined in the General Manager’s January 2019 Keeping Metro Safe, Reliable, and Affordable (KMSRA 2019) plan. Furthermore, we recognize the ongoing need for major State of Good Repair projects, e.g., power infrastructure and radio system upgrades. Nevertheless, KMSRA 2019 does not address the need for substantive improvements in the quality, consistency, and frequency of WMATA Communications. Nor does KMSRA 2019 address the urgent need to improve bus and rail off-peak service levels or better manage disruptive evening and weekend maintenance projects. We believe that these concerns must be at the heart of the FY2021 Budget.

The RAC recognizes that the Board will revisit existing fare levels as part of the FY2021 budget development process. Reviewing existing fare levels provides the Board with an additional chance to assess the degree to which WMATA is meeting its objectives. At previous RAC meetings, we have discussed the need to ensure that WMATA fares and service levels are equitable to all riders. For that reason, given current service levels and quality, the RAC cannot endorse a base fare increase. With that said, we believe the review of fare levels provides the chance to think creatively about the overall fare structure to benefit both riders and the agency.

Metrorail fares are calculated with a base fare of $2 to $2.25 and a distance component based on “composite miles” that increases in increments of $0.25.¹ At the present time, fares are capped at a maximum of $6.00 and $3.85 during peak and off-peak service levels respectively. This artificially caps fares for longer suburban commuters and imposes higher costs on shorter trips where WMATA competes with micromobility (e.g, scooters and bikeshare) and rideshare companies, often making WMATA uncompetitive on a price basis.² The RAC believes that this creates a perverse incentive to choose micromobility or rideshare instead of Metrobus or Metrorail. The potential opening of the Silver Line’s Phase II in FY21 is illustrative: suburban commuters from Loudoun and points west would, in effect, be subsidized by the overwhelming majority of Metrorail ridership.

The RAC does not believe that the Board should increase fares in this year’s review of fare policy. However, if the Board chooses to raise fares, any fare increase should be implemented by raising the fare cap and not increasing the base fare.

Conscious of the fact that fare increases adversely affect those who are most economically vulnerable, the RAC proposes the Board to work with WMATA jurisdictions to implement a program to subsidize the purchase of WMATA unlimited passes for those least able to afford them. As proposed in WMATA’s 2018 Stabilizing and Growing Metro Ridership report, a subsidized pass product would significantly ease the impact of fare increases on lower income customers, the same customers who are least likely to receive transit subsidies or pre-tax transit benefits.³

For Metrobus riders, especially those with lower or fixed incomes, a fare increase would be profoundly inequitable. The uncertain implementation of the improvements suggested by the Bus Transformation Project echos the collective failure of similar efforts since the early 2000s. A recent study jointly conducted by the Coalition for Smarter Growth and MetroHero demonstrates the ongoing need for rapid improvements in regional bus infrastructure, using the WMATA Priority Corridor Network routes as an example.⁴ The routes examined—ostensibly some of the most important in the District of Columbia—found headway and schedule adherence to be 64% and 60% respectively, with an average speed of 9.5mph. While WMATA cannot unilaterally build bus lanes, it can implement service changes like all-door boarding.

In the 2018 Stabilizing and Growing Metro Ridership report, WMATA staff projected that all-door boarding would result in faster, more efficient operations, resulting in a potential 10% increase in ridership and thus greater farebox recovery.⁵ Furthermore, as noted in the June 2019 RAC report and presentation, San Fransisco’s implementation of all-door bus boarding has resulted in faster buses, a higher level of farebox compliance (resulting in $1.9 million in additional fare revenues), and an overall ridership increase.⁶ It is for these reasons that the RAC is opposed to a Metrobus fare increase, especially as Metro has declined to take steps proposed by its own staff to achieve a significantly more efficient bus operation, reduce fare evasion, and increase ridership. The region faces a choice: build bus infrastructure and optimize the bus network or prepare to reckon with further ridership and service quality declines, in effect the “transit death spiral” for a vital component of the regional transportation system.

Finally, the RAC was puzzled by a description of the fare review process as the need to “strike a balance between taxpayers and riders.” This struck many RAC members as a false dichotomy. While it is conceivable that someone could pass through WMATA’s entire service area without engaging it any other economic activity that would incur taxation, it is highly unlikely. Riders are taxpayers and an argument that grounds itself on the idea that taxpayers and riders have competing interests is doomed to fail.

Improving Access to Unlimited Passes

As part of the FY2020 budget, WMATA introduced a number of new and enhanced pass products designed to increase ridership and provide better value to customers. While these passes could potentially save riders significant sums of money per month, they are exceedingly difficult to purchase. Straightforward pass purchase information on WMATA.com is difficult to find and is spread across multiple pages. A single page which featured more graphical information than blocks of text and which uses an easily remembered URL (e.g., WMATA.com/unlimited) would be a positive step forward. For riders without regular internet access or who are unbanked, these passes are almost totally inaccessible. Furthermore, WMATA must simplify the SmartBenefits process, making it as simple as possible for customers to buy passes using SmartBenefits. At the present time, the largest single block of weekday commuters, federal employees, are apparently unable to purchase passes, a lost opportunity to convert weekday commuters into off-peak users.

Metro Must Communicate Quality

As the RAC has repeatedly highlighted, WMATA must communicate its quality. Statistically, Metrorail service has improved since SafeTrack. But riders and regional stakeholders continue to report that communications, especially during service disruptions are insufficient and often fail to accurately report the necessary information. For example, on Friday the 20th of September, multiple incidents during the morning rush caused significant disruption for riders along the Orange, Silver, and Blue lines. For the duration of these incidents, it was ultimately unclear how WMATA was responding and how riders should themselves respond to severe service disruptions. Information available on the PIDS in each Metrorail station was unclear at best, frequently reverting to simply displaying train arrival times of “DLY” without further context. Empowering station managers to provide better real time travel information and advice, as WMATA staff suggested in May 2018, could significantly improve service quality and customer experience.⁷

Improve Realtime Service Information

In its existing form, Metro’s realtime data is not provided in the standard General Transit Feed Specification Realtime (GTFS-R) format. Providing WMATA’s data in a more standard format would enable more transit apps and trip planning tools (e.g., Google Maps Transit) to provide significantly more reliable information than the schedule only data they currently provide, as schedule data are effectively meaningless during service disruptions.⁸ Contrast this with the announcement by San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit to provide realtime disruption information from their Rail Operations Control Center via the GTFS-R specification.⁹ In a similar vein, the schedule data provided to WMATA’s data feeds is updated inconsistently and often fails to reflect the most recent schedule data. Finally, realtime bus service data is hindered by non-functional, misconfigured, or simply not powered on transceivers to transmit bus location data. This lack of accurate service information results in missed bus-rail connections and is likely a drag on Metrobus overall ridership.

Blue/Yellow Platform Project 2019

The RAC wishes to commend Jim Hamre and Michael Weinberger from WMATA’s Office of Bus Planning for their considerable efforts to prepare and manage the replacement shuttle and bus program during this past summer’s platform reconstruction project. The RAC looks forward to working with them during the coming shutdowns in 2020 and 2021. We are grateful for their forthright answers to our questions and their responsiveness to our concerns.

As always, the RAC stands ready to work with the Board and WMATA staff to take the steps necessary to win back riders and improve service quality. We look forward to serious and ongoing engagement to serve the region and solve our transportation challenges.

WMATA Tariff 38, February 2018. Available at: http://bit.ly/wmatafares18. ↩︎
On the idiosyncratic nature of WMATA’s fare structure in relation to other transit agencies, see: Rowlands, D. W. “WMATA plans to raise rates, but Metrorail’s fares already among highest in the country.” D.C. Policy Center, 1 March 2017. Available at: http://bit.ly/dw-fares. ↩︎
Stabilizing and Growing Metro Ridership, page 24. Available at: http://bit.ly/wmata-ride. ↩︎
The Metrobus Report Card examined the performance of Priority Corridor Network routes in the District of Columbia. Available at: metrobusreportcard.com. ↩︎
Stabilizing and Growing Metro Ridership, page 11. Available at: http://bit.ly/wmata-ride. ↩︎
San Fransisco Municipal Transportation Agency All-Door Boarding Evaluation Final Report. Available at: http://bit.ly/smfta ↩︎
Stabilizing and Growing Metro Ridership, page 18. Available at: http://bit.ly/wmata-ride. ↩︎
Ibid. and WMATA API Real Time Rail Predictions. Available at: http://bit.ly/met-apis. General Transit Feed Specification Realtime. Available at: http://bit.ly/met-gtfs. ↩︎
Bay Area Rapid Transit, 17 September 2019. Available at: http://bit.ly/bart ↩︎

Tags on /home/anelki

The Crisis of Austrian Democracy

Enter the Bundespräsident stage left

Austria’s 2024 Federal Election: Turning Point for the Far Right

Eleven Years of Turmoil

Campaign Themes

2024 Election Results

Thunder on the Right

Who Governs?

Conclusion

don't be one of those people, part 2

don't be one of those people

package mismanagement: mac homebrew

$ curl | sudo bash until you’re drunk

$ hey google [analytics]

$ brew install yolo

$ sudo port install sanity

$ slip into some jorts

$ man -k ports

$ tldr post

$ exit 0

see also

annoyed! also furious!

I’m really annoyed!

On leaving the WMATA Riders' Advisory Council

messaging madness

Have malicious SSH attacks increased since COVID-19 began? Yes.

Methodology

Results

Pretty Charts

internet friends

the cost of taking a walk

edit 2020-03-31 00:30

life in mono

Ausnahmezustand

Edit 2020-03-29:

pandemic times

fate

luck

gratitude

an apology

now. go wash your fucking hands, please.

the current crisis

at a loss for words

the world hangs together by a thread

wash your fucking hands

burnt out lightbulb

no other way but forward

email madness

YIKES.

PTSD and Youtube

cheat sheets

WARC me up, Scotty

Using wget for web archiving

privacy. fucking. matters.

privacy. fucking. matters.

the spy in your pocket

going off to/at #transpo20

Not just smartphone pings but SmarTrip taps

You probably think this song is about you, Kevin (it is, lol)

Big Data, Little Ethics?

Building a Personal Memex

Life in the Devonian Era

Send in the [History] Hounds

Bless This Mess

2020-01-22 Update: UTF-8!

stray thought re: nostalgia

nostalgia, or, _„Zeiten wie diese“_

in which I attempt to thread some needles

während „Zeiten wie diese“

the_series_of_tubes

the internet is a series of tubes

WMATA rac-attac: september '19

Fiscal Year 2021 Budget

Improving Access to Unlimited Passes

Metro Must Communicate Quality

Improve Realtime Service Information

Blue/Yellow Platform Project 2019

Using `wget` for web archiving