When Trump readied the 11th Airborne Division out of Alaska for potential deployment to Minneapolis to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents in their immigration crackdown, I posted the big scoop: the operations leader for that unit was none other than Canadian Brigadier-General Robert McBride. I subsequently wrote about the intertwined nature of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and the US military for The Economist.

The ties detailed involved exchanges, secondments, embeds, task forces, and other joint operations, including training. At any time, there are hundreds of our service members sprinkled across the vast US military, with several more in the North American Aerospace Defense Command or overseas serving with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the United States Central Command, and others.

That story rattled both Ottawa and Washington. The Department of National Defence was keen to separate themselves from the idea of a Canadian military member partaking in the brutality visited upon civilians in Minneapolis. They assured the public that there are safeguards in place to prevent a Canadian being “deployed” with an American unit, including that any such actions would have to be approved at the highest levels (but it does happen: see my previous coverage about the Iraq invasion).

But the DND was extremely skittish when it came to answering questions about intelligence sharing between Canada and the US and potential CAF involvement in Operation Southern Spear. Weeks of plugging away at sources in the US military, CAF, Ottawa, Washington, and the Open Source community brought me to the tipping point.

Here’s what I found out: by nature of our military relationship with the US, Canada is implicated in Operation Southern Spear. The question is to what degree.

The prime minister’s seat was empty in the House of Commons during the marathon four-hour debate on the Iran war on the evening of March 9. Mark Carney blamed scheduling issues, but it was a notable absence, jumped on by the Conservatives, who claimed he was in hiding.

The foreign minister, Anita Anand, got the first chance at the empty hot seat instead to try to defend the government’s inconsistencies in its approach to the American and Israeli attack on Iran. Anand did her best with a weak hand, suggesting the core principle at stake for the Liberals was to ensure that Iran never acquired nuclear weapons and stopped acting as a terrorist agent of disruption in the region and the world.

The defence minister, David McGuinty, also got his time in the hot seat. He spoke to emphasize the need for de-escalation of the Iran war, without even sketching a starting point or a plan. He also suggested an optimistic outlook for the Iran war, arguing that the weakening of a repressive regime would open the door to a better future. Note weakening, not all-out regime change.

The Canadian position on the Iran war is now incoherent. If the original, allegedly “realpolitik,” decision to go all in with the United States and Israel was based on winning favour with the Donald Trump administration, or at least avoiding disfavour, any such win, doubtful in the first place, has now been lost, and we are back in a position where we can join the list of those countries who Secretary of War (truly) Pete Hegseth will say are “clutching their pearls.”

As part of my book “ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web“, I created a coding example to show how to program for the ActivityPub API. ap is a command-line client, written in Python, for doing basic tasks with ActivityPub.

For example, you can log into a server using this command:

<div>ap login yourname@yourserver.example</div>

Once you’re logged in, you can follow someone:

<div>ap follow other@different.example</div>

Or, you could post some content:

<div>ap create note --public "Hello, World"</div>

This isn’t enough to have a real social networking experience, but I think it’s pretty useful for testing an ActivityPub API server, or automating some repetitive tasks.

I should note quickly here that not all ActivityPub servers support the ActivityPub API. It’s an under-utilized part of the ActivityPub standard. In particular, Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, and other services don’t support the API. There’s a pretty good list of servers and clients that do support the API in this Codeberg issue.

Suffice it to say, unless you’re actively working with one of those platforms, or you are writing your own, you’re not going to get much use out of ap. It will probably give you an error message like “No OAuth endpoints found” if it can’t use the service.

Refreshing the project

I’ve never packaged ap for distribution; it was always supposed to be example code. But given the recent interest in the ActivityPub API, including the work going on in the ActivityPub API task force, I decided to get it into shape for installation by developers working on other apps. My friend Matthias Pfefferle of Automattic asked me about it when we were at FOSDEM this year, and I was embarrassed to see how difficult it was for him to use.

So, I’ve made two big upgrades to the package. The first was actually making it a package, and distributing it! I upgraded the package management framework to uv, which seems like a good bet for now, and pushing the application to PyPI, the Python Package Index. It’s visible at pypi.org/project/activitypub-c… now. (Note: different package name from the command name! The PyPI “ap” package name was taken a while ago.)

You can now install the application in one shot with this command on a computer that has Python on it:

<div>pipx install activitypub-cli</div>

You can test that the application installed correctly in your path by running the version command:

<div>ap version</div>

That should show the same version as is currently on the pypi.org page for the project.

The second change was implementing the current OAuth 2.0 profile best practices. I’ve upgraded the login flow so it tries a lot of different options for identifying itself to the server: CIMD, FEP d8c2, and Dynamic Client Registration. It tries to do them in preferential order; it uses permanent, global client identifiers before dynamic ones.

Help me test

I’m especially interested in testing this command-line client against other servers. If you’re developing an ActivityPub API server, please install the ap command and try it out against your (development!) server. Report a bug if it doesn’t work well, or send me a DM at @evanprodromou if it works OK. Given time, I think ap can be a useful first smoke test for ActivityPub API implementations.

A video taken at Burgers' Zoo featuring Malayan sun bears in a lush, multi-level habitat. The video begins with a close-up of a sun bear down on the ground. The bear, characterized by its sleek, glossy black fur, stocky build, and distinctively pale, yellowish snout, is actively foraging. It walks slowly from left to right over a forest floor covered in wood chips, loose dirt, and scattered rocks, keeping its nose close to the ground to sniff out snacks. It briefly walks behind a low black metal fence before heading towards a rocky area with a hollow, cave-like log.

The camera then pans upwards, traveling away from the ground and up along a tall, elaborate climbing structure made of thick, bare tree trunks connected by ropes. Way up high, nestled among the green canopy of the surrounding trees, the camera finds two more sun bears resting on a thick horizontal wooden log. The camera zooms in on the pair as they sit facing each other, looking comfortable and relaxed high above the ground.

Malayan sun bears, native to the tropical forests of Southeast Asia, are the smallest bear species in the world. They are highly arboreal and are exceptional climbers thanks to their long, curved claws. They naturally spend a great deal of their time high up in the trees, which makes the tall climbing structures in their enclosure perfect for their natural behaviors!

Video taken on 02/07/2011 at Burgers' Zoo, Arnhem, the Netherlands. Shot by me, Cynni, with a Nikon Coolpix P500.