[[!sidebar content="""
* [[Install]]
* [[FAQ]]
* [[News]]
* [[Bugs]]
* [[Todo]]
* [[Forum]]
* [[Protocol]]
* [[Evidence]]
* [[Servers]]
"""]]

[[!meta title="debug-me - secure remote debugging"]]

Debugging a problem over email/irc/BTS is slow, tedious, and hard. The
developer needs to see the your problem to understand it. Debug-me aims to
make debugging fast, fun, and easy, by letting the developer access your
computer remotely, so they can immediately see and interact with the
problem. Making your problem their problem gets it fixed fast.  As
Simon Tatham [[puts it|https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html]],
"In a nutshell, the aim of a bug report is to enable the programmer to see the
program failing in front of them."  debug-me does just that!

A debug-me session is logged and signed with the developer's GnuPG key,
producing a [[chain of evidence|evidence]] of what they saw and what they
did. So the developer's good reputation is leveraged to make debug-me
secure. If you trust a developer to ship software to your computer,
you can trust them to debug-me.

When you start debug-me without any options, it will connect to a debug-me
[[server|servers]], and print out an url that you can give to the developer
to get them connected to you. Then debug-me will show you their GnuPG key,
who has signed it, and will let you know if they are a known developer
of software on your computer. If the developer has a good reputation, you can
proceed to let them type into your console in a debug-me session. Once the
session is done, the debug-me server will email you the signed evidence of
what the developer did in the session.

If the developer did do something bad, you'd have proof that they cannot
be trusted, which you can share with the world. Knowing that is the case
will keep developers honest.

<video controls width=400 title="debug-me demo" src="https://downloads.kitenet.net/videos/debug-me/debug-me-demo.webm"></video>
<video controls width=400 title="debug-me logs" src="https://downloads.kitenet.net/videos/debug-me/debug-me-logs.webm"></video>

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Debug-me is free software, created by [Joey Hess](https://joeyh.name/)
and licensed under the terms of the Gnu AGPL version 3 or greater.
