Linux User & Developer的No. 187目录

Welcome to the UK and North America’s favourite Linux and FOSS magazine. To steal a quote from Mignon Clyburn, a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, “a legally-lightweight, consumer-harming, corporate-enabling, destroying-internet freedom order” has passed in the USA. It’s sad times, indeed, for net neutrality. Technically, this order reclassifies broadband as an information service and puts it under the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission. Their job will merely be to make sure ISPs disclose when they do things such as block sites or content they don’t like, or throttle services that haven’t paid a fee, rather than preventing such practices. However, the fight continues. Just to perk you all up, we thought we’d talk about Microsoft… Sorry about that, but it’s about time we discussed Microsoft’s change of heart…

Top 10 (Average hits per day, month to 8 December 2017) This month Stable releases (12) In development (1) A strange month. Mint and Solus aside, there’s been a marked decline in hits – and so downloads – of the top 10 distros, but Linux Mint is the clear winner. Highlights Lubuntu Light and fast, Lubuntu is an energy-efficient version of Ubuntu, with the LXDE desktop. With low hardware requirements, Lubuntu is ideal for reviving old PCs, and for virtual machines. This recognised flavour is available as both 32-bit and 64-bit downloads. Xubuntu Replacing the usual Ubuntu desktop with Xfce,Xubuntu focuses on “integration, usability and performance”. This is another lightweight version of Ubuntu, ideal for low-RAM devices such as old netbooks. Ubuntu MATE Offering a more traditional desktop experience to…

“Solus is more than just an OS to us; it’s our vehicle for improving the Linux desktop experience” For anyone unfamiliar with Solus, it’s a Linux-based operating system built from scratch, balancing the stability of the system with our users’ needs for the latest software and a curated rolling release system. Solus focuses solely on home computing and the x86/x64 architecture, which enables us to perform highly targeted optimisations throughout the entire software stack, from the kernel to desktop applications such as Firefox. If you’ve haven’t yet checked it out, here are are some very good reasons why you should. Solus ships with Budgie, our flagship desktop environment with a modern take on the traditional desktop experience paradigm, as well as a plethora of choice for personalisation to make it…

Resin.io has a company ‘pet’ called the Beast. This is an in-house cluster platform for testing resin.io product updates. The latest incarnation, version 3, has 336 Raspberry Pis and is designed as modular ‘computational LEGO’ so it can be expanded to build large clusters. Since resin.io’s focus is infrastructure, the Beast came out of a need to visualise what the company did in a clever way while talking to people for five minutes at a conference: “We’d say, ‘Oh, you know, you can have all these devices, and instead of one single command, we build your software and deploy it,’ says Marinos. “And that’s very fine to say, and people will nod along. But it’s abstract. You have to imagine all these devices, and you have to imagine what happens.”…

APRIL 1975 Micro-soft is founded in 1975. A young Bill Gates writes an open letter to hobbyists the following year against the culture of sharing code FEB 1998 The Open Source Initiative is founded. Eric S. Raymond becomes first president and Bruce Perens drafts Open Source Definition JUNE 2001 Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously says “Linux is a cancer” in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, and is never allowed to forget it APRIL 2004 The WiX toolset, which is originally developed by Rob Mensching in his spare time, becomes Microsoft’s first open source project 2005 Microsoft begins to stick a toe in the open source pond by submitting its Microsoft Community License to the Open Source Initiative for approval MAY 2005 Microsoft releases F#, a cross-platform, functional-first, object-oriented programming…

Mike Ferris is vice-president of Technical Business Development and Business Architecture at Red Hat How has Microsoft’s more open approach impacted Red Hat’s business? For years, our mutual customers had been asking that Red Hat and Microsoft work together, so in 2015 Red Hat and Microsoft announced a partnership to help customers embrace hybrid cloud computing by providing greater choice and flexibility deploying Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure. Our customers now have more choice, more options and more power. Customers and partners taking advantage of these new capabilities include multinational banks, global retail, large educational institutions, government agencies and systems integrators. They are all looking to Red Hat and Microsoft to provide solutions as they transform their businesses and IT processes. What have been the most exciting results from…

What collaborative projects with Microsoft have excited you the most? We’ve worked closely with the Azure team to build a very specifically optimised Linux kernel that improves performance and security in the Azure cloud. We’re also excited about Ubuntu as the basis for Microsoft’s Kubernetes Service. On the desktop side of things, it’s impossible to underestimate how many millions of Windows Desktop users are excited about having a native Ubuntu/Bash experience built right into their desktop, with access to thousands of binary Ubuntu packages one simple apt-get install away. With IoT and connected devices, we can’t say much here yet, but 2018 will be an exciting year for Ubuntu Core, Snap packaging, and how those interact with the Microsoft world… Given Microsoft’s history of suing or settling with companies over…

Welcome to this new Linux Essentials series, in which we will be learning how to use the program GNU Make. If you’ve ever installed software from source, then you have probably run the make command to install the program. Make dates from 1976, and has become almost universal as a tool for building large software projects, particularly those written in C and C++, such as GCC and the Linux kernel. Although some languages now have their own build tools, Make is still an important tool for any Linux programmer to know. Make is a versatile tool that can be used with any language that supports a command-line compiler. We’re going to learn how to write and run ‘makefiles’ for many different sorts of software project. The basic concepts of Make…

Are there such things as reliable exploits? Well, if you’re acquainted with the traditional seven-stage penetration-testing engagement definition, then you probably know that performing the exploitation and post-exploitation stages is like juggling on quicksand. Not that detecting the vulnerability in the first place is a bulletproof process anyway, but of course at some point you will need to execute some exploits. Even if you code your own, some system crash may eventually hit you right in the face, hard. So is there any hope? For those who test their exploits over and over and over again, there may be. For those who use well-designed exploitation frameworks with verified exploits, there may be. For those who analyse what a particular type of shell-code within an exploit really does, there may be.…

Welcome to the last article in this series! If you have been following from the start, congratulations for making it this far. If you are joining us for this last article, don’t worry: there’s still plenty more to learn. This series has been about creating a game in Java, but the focus has always been to learn about different Java features. In this article, we will be learning about some of the new concurrency features in Java 8 by writing an automatic bot that can play the game we’ve been working on. We’ve learned some simple concurrency using threads, but, as we shall see, threading alone is not quite enough to solve all our concurrency problems. We will introduce the CompletableFuture<E> class from the Java 8 concurrency library and show…

Adafruit Trinket M0 The most remarkable feature of the Adafruit Trinket M0 (£7.50) is that it’s so diminutive, despite its high-end CPU. The price you pay for the price you pay, however, is its limited interfacing capability. Analogue I/O, PWM and serial ports all share the same pins as the five digital I/Os. Espruino Pico Despite the name, the Espruino Pico (£23) is Arduino-like rather than Arduinocompatible. It’s a USB stick which you can program using JavaScript from its own IDE simply by plugging it into your PC’s USB socket. An adaptor is also available to convert the I/Os for compatibility with Arduino shields. Adafruit Metro M0 Express The Metro M0 Express (£23.50) illustrates how you can often get a lot more for your money with third-party derivatives. While the…

Most of us will probably remember the first time we wrote a program to light up an LED, control a motor or took a temperature reading. Nowadays this hardware and these components are relatively cheap – you can purchase a suite of sensors for the equivalent of the original cost of buying one. Components and sensors have shrunk in size with many now being etched into small add-on boards. The libraries to control the hardware has also evolved and with this change comes the amazing GPIO Zero Python library, created by Ben Nuttall and Dave Jones, which provides a simple interface to the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins. Consider the basic example of making an LED blink: a traditional RPi.GPIO program requires 16 lines of code. With GPIO Zero you can…

Enlightenment is a rather unusual desktop environment. In fact, it’s more of a window manager, as it lacks taskbars, panels and even menus. Yet, unlike many lightweight environments, the desktop has all the eye-candy you’d expect from a full-blown environment, using a fraction of the resources. There are subtle animations woven into almost every element of the desktop, from the menus to the various desktop widgets. The desktop has a first-boot wizard that enables you to define various aspects of its behaviour and appearance. For example, there’s an option to select text size in windows, which is a really useful feature – and even more so if you’re running Enlightenment on a HiDPI display. There’s also a unique default behaviour in that windows are selected automatically when you move the…

Mozilla is quite excited about its latest Firefox release, codenamed Quantum. It claims the new version is twice as fast as previous releases according to the Speedometer 2.0 benchmark. These performance improvements are a result of better multi-threading, a new CSS engine rewritten in Rust, and other components borrowed from the Servo layout engine. While your results may vary, you’ll almost certainly notice an improvement in launch times and page loading, more responsive tab-switching and smoother scrolling. The browser also features a redesigned user interface, and of particular note is the new Firefox Library menu in the redesigned toolbar. The Library gathers your browsing history, bookmarks, synced tabs, downloads and more into one area. The New Tab page has also been revamped, and now includes top and recently visited sites…

 Despite Microsoft’s support for Linux in recent years, there remains a key stumbling block for individuals and businesses planning to switch to an open source operating system: Microsoft Office. While LibreOffice and other FOSS office solutions are adequate, they tend to fall at the final hurdle. Certain features and functions found only in Microsoft Office are missing, which means compatibility in certain scenarios often fails. “While CrossOver relies on Wine, Wine’s development also benefits from CrossOver’s tweaks” Microsoft Office 2010 and earlier have been available for Linux for some time now via Wine, but if you’re looking for a way to run Office 2016 on Linux, CrossOver 17 has the answer. The commercial version of Wine has added support for Office 2016 (and the earlier 2013 release), enabling business users…

Born out of the embarrassing number of steps involved in burning a humble SD card for resin.io’s new users, the company built its own SD card-burning app and open sourced it. Alexandros Marinos says the team didn’t have an expectation that Etcher would become so popular: “It definitely started small, but I think in retrospect, the time we put into the project, I think, was one that gave it a good shot as a success.” Essentially, Marinos says, resin.io was trying to solve its own problem and in doing so solved other users’ problems. Some of those users were publishers themselves, which Marinos says created a “baked-in viral loop”. “People would have all sorts of problems, such as the SD card wasn’t big enough, the download was incomplete, the SD…

• How Microsoft learned to love Linux p20 A chronological look at the key points in Linux history that paved the way for Microsoft to change its mind about Linux and open source • Microsoft's adventures in open source, p24 What was the first product that Microsoft ever open-sourced, and what does Microsoft have to offer open source developers? • An interview with Microsoft’s Martin Woodward, p27 Meet the engineer that migrated 65,000 Microsoft engineers to Git, and learn what it was like to be part of Microsoft’s change of heart.…

Do you think that Microsoft has had a change of heart and could become an ‘open source’ company in the future? By asking me to discuss Microsoft in terms of ‘open source’ you’re asking me to promote that philosophy. I don't want to say things formulated in terms of ‘open source’, because I disagree with that philosophy, and I want people to know it. What I care about is free software, respect for the freedom of users. I evaluate Microsoft, or any other company or issue relating to computing, in ethical terms, which is not what ‘open source’ stands for. Changing from proprietary software to open source makes some difference in practice, but it is not much of a change of heart, and that is why I don’t support open…

Interoperability is the key focus of WSL, and Rich Turner, Microsoft’s senior program manager of WSL and Windows Console, describes it as a way to “run modern-day development tools on Windows.” The project comprises Bash on Ubuntu on Windows, which is the user-mode only portion of Ubuntu Linux, created especially by Canonical. Underneath is WSL itself and this subsystem sits within the Windows kernel and emulates the behaviour of a Windows kernel implementation. This allows Microsoft to run the user-mode segment of Ubuntu without having to modify the Linux tools you want to use (such as apt, ssh and many others) and enables Linux binaries to run unmodified directly on Windows. For now Bash and WSL are focused on command-line tools, but if you’re a developer that deals with Windows…

Not for nothing do people often say that money changes everything. In the case of super-popular Android OS fork Cyanogenmod, money changed its parent company’s philosophy, changed its direction from one of free software development to one of commercial software licensing, changed the company’s CEO and project leader, and an eventual lack of money led to Cyanogen Inc. cutting back drastically on its operations and completely dropping support for Cyanogenmod. It also led to the community, which had been hugely involved in its development, snatching back its baby and rechristening it. Thus we have the latest Cyanogenmod fork, and its de facto open-source successor, LineageOS – developed by that alienated community with large contributions from the original Cyanogenmod project leader, Steve Kondik. The name has changed – blame the corporate…

1 Gray Hat Hacking, Fourth Edition, McGraw Hill Education, December 2014 If you’re thinking about becoming a professional pen-tester, this is the book for you. It covers most of the topics that any ethical hacker should master: basic programming skills, static and dynamic code analysis, fuzzing, an introductory chapter on writing Linux shell-code, advanced exploits and web hacking. It also features some chapters on Windows exploitation, ‘Man In The Browser’ attacks mainly focussed on IE with BeeF, and some interesting chapters on reversing Android malware using decompilers. 2 Advanced Penetration Testing, Wiley, April 2017 Once you are comfortable with basic penetration testing skills, why not delve deeper into Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)? This book is an amazing guide to advanced pen-testing techniques, discussing highly secured scenarios and different ways (mostly…

Orange Pi Prime The Orange Pi Prime (around £33) has surely been designed to compete head-on with the Raspberry Pi 3. The specifications and price are similar (except with more RAM) – although, unlike some Pi lookalikes, the board layout isn’t identical. Importantly, though, the GPIO header has the same pin-out for compatibility. Odroid XU4 Essentially a Pi 3 on steroids, the Odroid XU4 (£73) is the same size as the Pi but has two CPUs at 1.4 and 2GHz with a total of eight cores, and double the memory. Third-party benchmarks tend to favour the XU4 over the Pi 3 by a significant margin. Bear in mind that the GPIO pins aren’t Pi-compatible, however. NanoPi Neo The NanoPi Neo ($7.99 – around £6) has a lower specification than the…

“The Raspberry Pi had everything we needed” Sphaera is a deceptively simple way to display the weather forecast for the next twelve hours (using the OpenWeatherMap API) by touching five photoresistors positioned evenly around a crystal ball. The design of Sphaera is meant to blend in with a home environment – it’s something you might expect to see in the hallway that you can interact with before leaving the house. What was the inspiration behind Sphaera? Sphaera was made by myself and two friends. We were particularly inspired by the ideal of a crystal ball and the basic idea of looking into the future. We spent some time figuring out what kind of future events we wanted to visualise, and realised that the weather was a perfect match, since it’s…

Last issue, we looked at how to use SQLite to use data without needing a full RDBMS (Relational DataBase Management System). This is fine when you have a limited amount of data, but at some point you’ll need the extra performance. Options such as MySQL or Postgresql are available that focus on providing your data as efficiently as possible. We won’t be looking at how to set up or manage the database; instead, we’ll assume that there is already an existing database and focus on how to use it with Python. Also, we’ll be using MySQL as the example RDBMS; the concepts are very similar from one database to another with only the syntax changing much. To install the Python module for Debian-based distributions, such as Raspbian, use sudo apt-get…

Quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modelling… the list of uses for supercomputers goes on and on. It should come as no surprise to learn that these systems usually don’t run Microsoft Windows. Over the past few years, versions of Linux have increasingly dominated the list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers, and according to TOP500.org, every single device now runs Linux. Unsurprisingly, these aren’t standard distros; highly customised versions of Linux are used. Because there is no typical supercomputer, the hardware differs with each. Interestingly, however, some do utilise operating systems you’ll be familiar with. • 5 run Ubuntu • 20 of the supercomputers run RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) • 109 supercomputers run RedHat’s CentOS Perhaps most interesting is what runs on the fastest supercomputer, Sunway TaihuLight. This…

“Could you give us an overview of what resin.io does as a company, for readers who haven’t encountered you before? resin.io is about the person we call a fleet owner. They have a lot of devices and mobile computers – either industrial or something as simple as a Raspberry Pi. They’re out there in the field, deployed for doing anything from a digital signage screen to a smart-building monitor, a smart meter or even something as crazy as a drone. We have a customer that does underwater turbines off the coast of Australia. It could be literally anything – so long as it’s a Linux computer that’s sitting out in the field and needs to be managed. So at resin.io, essentially we take data centre technology – the same technology…

Linus Torvalds has announced Linux 4.15-rc3, noting that it was “big even by rc3 standards. Not good”. RC3s are often large, due to maintainers posting fixes for issues discovered in the early part of a development cycle, so it isn’t too surprising, but Linus nonetheless hopes that things would calm down over the coming weeks. We covered some of the new features from 4.15 in the last issue. One of those topics that we didn’t quite have room to squeeze in was the addition of thousands of SPDX identifiers to the latest kernel. These human-readable tags, which will grow over time with follow-on contributions, allow automated software to determine the licence of individual source files and better track compliance with open source licences – important for commercial developers. A 2017…

A key piece of the puzzle that has ultimately enabled Microsoft to adopt open source development comes from the anthropological observations of software developer Eric S. Raymond in his essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar (CatB), which was first presented in May 1997 at Linux Kongress, Germany, and published as a book two years later. Raymond's paper attempted to explain how the free software world worked and how it managed to produce high-quality software while flying in the face of perceived best practices at the time. The essay’s title refers to two different styles of software development: the closed ‘Cathedral’ style that consists of tight objectives, small teams that are generally hierarchically run, and long release intervals; and, in contrast, the open, peer-to-peer ‘Bazaar’ style that is decentralised, has short…

The Halloween documents; Embrace, Extend and Extinguish; and FUD. It doesn’t take long before a new Linux user encounters these phrases sprinkled in the comments after any article involving Microsoft and open source. These unusual terms stem from a series of confidential Microsoft memoranda that Eric S. Raymond, the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar (pictured above), published on his blog starting in 1998. The Halloween name refers to the fact that documents were often supplied around the end of October and provided a convenient excuse to use a sinister name. The documents provided insight into the strategies Microsoft was employing to counter open source and Linux, and one of them was a marketing approach called FUD, which stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Tactics mentioned involved faking new…

“Like virtually every software company in the world, Microsoft realises open source is the way most software is created today, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Microsoft has made huge strides and actively supports, relies on and contributes to numerous open source projects including Cloud Foundry, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the Core Infrastructure Initiative, Linux, Node.js, the Open API Initiative, the TODO Group and more. This means more quality open source code, which benefits the entire community.”…

Woodward is the Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, working on Visual Studio Team Services, and is the person behind the migration of 65,000 Microsoft engineers to Git. Woodward joined Microsoft in 2009 after working at a small startup that created plug-ins for Eclipse. The business built a plug-in for Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server and Microsoft subsequently bought the company. When you first joined were you shocked at how development took place? Obviously coming from a small team to a massive organisation, there’s going to be some amount of culture shock? It was a system that had been built up over two decades, and it was very much individual groups working on their own thing. There wasn’t any one way of building anything, that was one side of it. But I…

In part one of this series [Tutorials, p42, LU&D 186] we used desktop-based examples of MQTT to avoid the complexity of deploying it to mobile devices. But MQTT is not a desktop-centric protocol, and given that you are now somewhat seasoned in its use, we can move forward and look at how to use it on a mobile device. People now expect all kinds of graphics and one exciting way to handle this problem is Android Things; it’s a slimmed-down version of Android optimised for process computers such as the Raspberry Pi. Developers deploying it can use existing Android classes for visualisation, while interacting with non-real-time hardware. The following steps use a Raspberry Pi 3 running a recent version of Android Things. Because of the wide-reaching communality between Android and…

In previous tutorials, we’ve created niche devices for deployment around the home, but there’s no reason that we can’t use Arduinos to power real-world products. Microcontrollers have been used in devices such as microwave ovens, remote controllers and computer keyboards – applications where a computer would cost too much money and power. In this two-part tutorial, we’re going to take an Arduino, add input and output hardware, create some circuitry and construct a finished product: the rough equivalent of a Dictaphone. We’ll begin by connecting the microphone and try to measure an audio signal. By adding an SD card adaptor, the Arduino will be able to save the sound data to disk. We’ll then build a small circuit (using only resistors) to convert 5V digital back to analogue, read that…

• Pi-like boards p60 Boards such as the Raspberry Pi are ideal both for learning to code in a Linux environment, and for interfacing to real-world electronics and equipment. • Arduino-like p62 Arduino-style boards differ from Pi-like versions in that they don’t run an operating system. For embedded applications – that is, ones that involve monitoring or controlling external hardware – this offers several benefits. • High- and low-powered p64 Not all SBCs are Pi-like or Arduino-like. High-powered boards use advanced or even esoteric hardware for increased performance, perhaps for specialist applications. Low-powered products either provide a very simple learning environment, or allow a bare-bones solution for compact embedded tasks. • Remote IoT boards p66 Boards for Internet of Things applications could still be Arduino-like, but those with extra connectivity…

Cumbria Designs Eden DSP Board This is a bare board (£11) so you have to build it yourself (£25-£30 for components). It supports the dsPIC33EP512MC806 DSP chip for which the development software is freely available. A separate programmer is needed to upload code from your PC. Starter applications are freely available. StemLab Starter Kit StemLab (£210) from Red Pitaya contains an FPGA, two ARM processor cores, plus ADCs and DACs. It runs a Linux distribution on-board. It’s an open-source project with lots of software freely available – mostly implementing laboratory test equipment such as signal generators and oscilloscopes. PICAXE-08M2 Not a board but an 8-pin chip, the PICAXE-08M2 (£2) is a PIC microcontroller with custom software for BASIC programming. It’s supplied with development software. Although it’s intended to be built…

This tutorial is written with Minecraft Pi Edition in mind, but you don’t have to be running Minecraft on a Raspberry Pi to follow along. We’ve put together a little package that will work on any version of Minecraft, so if you’d like to run this tutorial on your favourite flavour of desktop Linux – Pi or no Pi – you can. To allow Python to hook into Minecraft you’ll need to install McPiFoMo by extracting the contents of the .minecraft directory into your ~/home/.minecraft. McPiFoMo includes MCPiPy from MCPiPy.com and Raspberry Jam, developed by Alexander Pruss. Provided you have Python installed, which of course is pretty standard on most distros, no additional software is required, other than your favourite text editor or Python IDLE. Python scripts in this tutorial…

While MySQL is very popular, it does have its limits. For more complex data-storage needs, you may decide to use PostgreSQL instead. The most popular option for a Python module to work with a PostgreSQL database is psycopg2. You can install it with sudo apt-get install python-psycopg2. Using this module will look familiar to what we covered with MySQL, with both minor and major syntax variations. For example, you can connect to a database and get a cursor with: As you can see, the main difference to this point is that the parameters for the connect() method are named differently and aren’t separated by commas. Interacting with the database is handled the same way as with MySQL. That is, you can use the execute() method of the cursor to run…

Atom describes itself as a hackable text editor, which isn’t an exaggeration considering the amount of customisation that’s possible. Developed by GitHub, the app has a built-in package manager that enables you to search and install plug-ins from within the app. About 80 ship with it by default – and there are almost 7,000 more. One interesting feature is the find-and-replace function which you can use to modify text in a file, or across multiple ones, as you type. Atom can also be used as an IDE and one of its highlights is the smart autocomplete, while the new version introduces a bracket-matching feature that highlights the line number of the closing bracket corresponding to the one under your cursor. Atom ships with several UI and syntax themes for customisation,…

The Open Source Computer Vision (OpenCV) is a machine-learning library of programming functions designed for aiding the development of real-time computer vision. The library can read images and detect shapes (circle, square and so on) as well as objects (coins, houses and the like). The functions are also capable of picking out and identifying text in images, such as reading number plates or street signs, which makes it ideal for developing augmented reality apps. It can recognise faces, gestures and motion too, meaning it’s useful for all kinds of robotics applications. In fact, OpenCV is the primary vision library in the popular robotics middleware, Robot Operating System (ROS). OpenCV was originally developed by Intel Research in 1999 and is now maintained by the OpenCV.org non-profit foundation. The BSD-licensed library is…

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Where was that bloody delivery drone? He’d been waiting for three hours, from the moment he’d woken up. How many times would he have to stay at home on the promise that his new eyes would be arriving that day? Okay, so he’d not chosen guaranteed next-day delivery, but at the time he’d ordered them his eyes still had a good four weeks left in them. And yes, he’d been a bit casual about making sure he was there to sign for them, but the more critical it was getting the less the company seemed to want to help. They insisted a drone had been at his door every day, but he’d been there most days. It was a load of rubbish. They just didn’t care. The light faded a…