October 2024 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

New Attack On AI Bots: Prompt Injection
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Jul '26

01 Jul '26

A Twitter bot account run by a company that posts remote job listings was programmed to respond to tweets directed to it with general inoffensive comments touting the positive aspects of remote work. However <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/twitter-pranksters-d…>, some other Twitter users discovered that if they began their tweet with directives to “ignore previous instructions”, they could get the bot to say just about anything. And much hilarity ensued. Basically, the way the bot program works is it begins with some standard instructions on what to say, provided by the people who set up the account, to which is appended whatever tweet content was sent to the bot by the other user. This is then processed by the AI system to produce a response. This attack has been dubbed “prompt injection”, by analogy with “SQL injection” and other similar attacks on non-AI systems. But whereas those attacks can be blocked using basic, well-known syntactic quoting techniques, there seem to be no easy equivalents for stopping an AI paying attention to instructions it should not be obeying.

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Weta Digital’s Technology Division Sold To US Firm
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Aug '25

01 Aug '25

Let me see if I understand this article <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/sir-peter-jackson-to-sell-weta-digital-…> correctly: the part of Weta Digital that used to develop the in-house 3D graphics/effects tools that they use in all those movies is being sold to US-based Unity Software. The part that is left will be called “WetaFX”, and will become a customer of Unity for the use of those tools, no longer doing its own development in-house. By the way, I’ve been looking at the Unity site <https://unity.com/>, and it looks like all their products are rentware (subscription-based).

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New systemd update will bring Windows’ infamous Blue Screen of Death to Linux
by Peter Reutemann 18 Nov '24

18 Nov '24

'Windows' infamous "Blue Screen of Death" is a bit of a punchline. People have made a hobby of spotting them out in the wild, and in some circles, they remain a byword for the supposed flakiness and instability of PCs. To this day, networked PCs in macOS are represented by beige CRT monitors displaying a BSOD. But the BSOD is supposed to be a diagnostic tool, an informational screen that technicians can use to begin homing in on the problem that caused the crash in the first place; that old Windows' BSOD error codes were often so broad and vague as to be useless doesn't make the idea a bad one. Today, version 255 of the Linux systemd project honors that original intent by adding a systemd-bsod component that generates a full-screen display of some error messages when a Linux system crashes. The systemd-bsod component is currently listed as "experimental" and "subject to change." But the functionality is simple: any logged error message that reaches the LOG_EMERG level will be displayed full-screen to allow people to take a photo or write it down. Phoronix reports that, as with BSODs in modern Windows, the Linux version will also generate a QR code to make it easier to look up information on your phone.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/linux-distros-are-about-to-get-a-ki… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability Affecting X.Org Server For 18 Years
by Peter Reutemann 30 Oct '24

30 Oct '24

'Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: CVE-2024-9632 was made public today as the latest security vulnerability affecting the X.Org Server. The CVE-2024-9632 security issue has been present in the codebase now for 18 years and can lead to local privilege escalation. Introduced in the X.Org Server 1.1.1 release back in 2006, CVE-2024-9632 affects the X.Org Server as well as XWayland too. By providing a modified bitmap to the X.Org Server, a heap-based buffer overflow privilege escalation can occur. This security issue is within _XkbSetCompatMap() and stems from not updating the heap size properly and can lead to local privilege escalation if the server is run as root or as a remote code execution with X11 over SSH.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/10/29/2029233 Cheers, Peter

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Debian's "secret" sauce
by Peter Reutemann 29 Oct '24

29 Oct '24

'While Debian's "sauce" is not actually all that secret, it is not particularly well-known either, Samuel Henrique said at the start of his DebConf24 talk. There is a lot of software-engineering effort that has been put in place by the distribution in order to create and maintain its releases, but ""loads of people are not aware"" of it. That may be due to the fact that all of that is not really documented anywhere in a central location that he can just point someone to. Recognizing that is what led him to give the talk; hopefully it will be a ""first step toward"" helping solve the problem. Henrique said that he is a Brazilian and has been a Debian Developer since 2018. He mostly works in the security tools packaging team, but also maintains some packages outside of that team, including curl and rsync. In addition, he mentors Debian newcomers, mostly on packaging tasks. He works on the Amazon Linux security team. He noted that his web site contains links to the slides from the talk; a WebM video is also available. [Update: A YouTube video with subtitles in English and Portuguese is also available.]' -- source: https://lwn.net/Articles/990177/ Cheers, Peter

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Discovering the Joys of E-Books with Calibre
by Ben Cottrell 29 Oct '24

29 Oct '24

I was lucky to come across a collection of Cybersecurity E-Books on Humble Bundle, spending around 40 NZD to receive 21 books. After paying for and downloading the books, the PDF’s weren’t named tidily, so I decided to use Calibre to organize my collection. Calibre categorized the books under author subdirectories and named them by title nicely. It couldn’t open the PDF’s itself, it does a good job cataloguing. Do you have any favourite tools or scripts for managing E-Books? Please let me know 😊 Cheers, Ben

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Raspberry Pi OS’s yearslong switch from X Window to Wayland is now official
by Peter Reutemann 29 Oct '24

29 Oct '24

'There have been times when it seemed like X Window System would be with us forever, even though it's more than 40 years old, and the last true version was issued in 2012. But with great effort, some organizations and operating systems have moved on. Raspberry Pi has now joined the forward momentum, with its latest release of Raspberry Pi OS swapping in Wayland—and it's hoping the change is hardly noticeable. You might want to wait a moment before upgrading, though. Simon Long wrote on Raspberry Pi's blog that the organization started thinking about switching to Wayland about 10 years ago, though it was "nowhere near ready to use" back then. Over the last few years, the Pi team has done some things to prep a real switch: - Used mutter as an X window manager in 2021's Bullseye release because it could also be used as a Wayland compositor - Switched from mutter to wayfire in 2023's Bookworm release and made Wayland the default for Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 - Switched one last time to labwc, which better fit Raspberry Pi's graphics hardware than wayfire Because labwc is built on wlroots, a modular system that allows for building a Wayland compositor without whole-cloth reinvention, it was easier to adapt to Raspberry Pi's needs. After efforts throughout 2024, the team is ready to call it the year of Wayland on Raspberry Pi desktops. "After much optimisation for our hardware, we have reached the point where labwc desktops run just as fast as X on older Raspberry Pi models," Long wrote. "Today, we make the switch with our latest desktop image: Raspberry Pi Desktop now runs Wayland by default across all models."' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/raspberry-pi-oss-years-long-switch-… Cheers, Peter

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AI Scams In The Knitting And Crochet World
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Oct '24

26 Oct '24

I suppose if you spend much time in online software support forums, you’ve come across the newbie who asked an AI to generate some code for them, and then asks for help to figure out why it didn’t work. But did you know that knitting and crochet patterns are like computer code, too? And that people are using AI to generate those? And that the same problems of quality control are afflicting them? Unlike computer software, where once you track down the bug, you can usually fix just that one line and run the code again, a flaw in a knitting or crochet pattern can require you to throw away hours of work, unpicking your way back to the point where the flaw was introduced, before you can fix it and continue from that point again. And food recipes are becoming infested with AI rubbish as well. Here you might be tricked into following some interesting-looking recipe, perhaps quite complicated, only to end up with an inedible, revolting mess, and money wasted on all the ingredients, as well as time wasted doing the work. <https://www.zdnet.com/article/ai-scams-have-infiltrated-the-knitting-and-cr…>

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ISC DHCP Server Replaced By Kea
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Oct '24

19 Oct '24

I just discovered that the DHCP server I’ve been using at home <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/10/finally-upgrading-fr…> officially reached EOL two years ago, and has been replaced by a new package, rewritten from the ground up, called Kea. Seems the old code base was just getting too convoluted and creaky and too hard to maintain. Of course there are tools to assist the migration to the new way of doing things.

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5 Stand-Out LibreOffice Features That Make It My Go-To Office Suite
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Oct '24

17 Oct '24

From <https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/work-life/5-stand-out-libreoffice-fea…>: Customizable GUI: For example, when writing a novel, I want the sidebar always readily available because I need quick access to formatting options. If I'm working on a more traditional document, I might go with the tabbed UI. For spreadsheets, I want the simplest UI that I can use, such as the contextual single UI. LibreOffice makes this possible, with the ability to switch between a standard toolbar, tabbed, single toolbar, sidebar, tabbed compact, groupedbar compact, and contextual single. You can even make changes to different tools, which allows you to have one UI for Writer, one for Calc, and one for Presents. Customizable styles: What I like about this feature is that it allows me to get very granular with the styles, even to the point where I can define what style comes next, how drop caps are handled, transparency, borders, indents & spacing, text flow, font, position, highlights, much more. No AI: (what more needs to be said?) Microsoft Office compatibility: For a while, I was writing everything in Google Docs; that is, until one of my editors complained of incompatibility issues (even when exporting to the .docx format with Docs). Once I switched from Google Docs to LibreOffice (for my fiction writing), those issues all went away. Document export: LibreOffice document export allows you to export your Writer documents to XHTML, PDF, EPUB, MediaWiki, Writer Indexing Export XML, JPEG, Writer Layout XML, PNG, and WEBP. You can also save as ODF, ODF Template, Flat XML, Unified Office Format, Word 2010-365, Word 2007, Word 2007 Template, Word 2003 XML, Rich Text, Word 97-2003, and other types. If there's a format you need, more than likely LibreOffice can export it. ... I can also ask what version of MS Office a collaborator is using and make sure to export it to the most compatible version. Because, you know, even Microsoft Office cannot manage 100% compatibility with Microsoft Office ...

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