February 2024 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Overzealous Spam Filters
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 07 Feb '24

07 Feb '24

Two recent news items about important messages being lost in the recipients’ spam filters. Some months ago, the Banking Ombudsman sent out a warning about investment scams to various financial institutions, but the ANZ never saw theirs <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/anz-misses-investment-scam-warning-from-banki…>. One scam victim believes that her case might have been caught sooner if the bank had taken suitable notice of such a warning. And a US-based team wanted to join Formula 1, but it seems they never got the invitation to meet in person to discuss their application, because it got classed as spam <https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/02/a-spam-folder-may-have-foiled-andretti…>. And so their application was rejected. But then, in this case you’d think more than one attempt would have been made to get in touch. In both cases, the sender address would have been something unusual, not the kind of thing you or I might see in our in-box (in one case, the Banking Ombudsman, in the other case, the Formula 1 rights body). If we got such a message, it would be wise to score it as being more likely to be some sort of scam. But for organizations that work in those areas that are more likely to engage in such communications, it would make sense to customize their spam filters in the opposite direction, don’t you think?

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Enabling Case-Insensitive Filenames On Linux
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Feb '24

06 Feb '24

The ext4 filesystem has had the “casefold” option for a while now <https://lwn.net/Articles/784041/>. This allows you to specify, when you initialize a new filesystem, that you want file/directory names to be treated as case-insensitive. At the same time, you have to specify that the filenames are to be interpreted as UTF-8 encoding; normally the kernel doesn’t care, it only singles out ASCII slash and NUL bytes for special interpretation, and simply passes through any other byte values in the names. I was able to create such a filesystem, but I wasn’t able to mount it in my last-upgraded-just-a-few-days-ago Debian Unstable setup. When I try, it fails, and in the dmesg log I see Filesystem with casefold feature cannot be mounted without CONFIG_UNICODE Turns out the Debian 5.10 kernel has not been built with this CONFIG_UNICODE option enabled. However, this situation looks set to change shortly, according to <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=985689>.

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browsh
by Peter Reutemann 06 Feb '24

06 Feb '24

Hi everyone Just came across browsh: 'A fully interactive, real-time, and modern text-based browser rendered to TTYs and browsers' https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh Seems like a cool way of browsing in the shell. I've used lynx in the past for that. 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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How a Microsoft Update Broke VS Code Editor on Ubuntu
by Peter Reutemann 05 Feb '24

05 Feb '24

'Microsoft's Visual Studio Code editor now includes a voice command that launches GitHub Copilot Chat just by saying "Hey Code." But one Linux blog notes that the editor has suddenly stopped supporting Ubuntu 18.04 LTS — "a move causing issues for scores of developers." VS Code 1.86 (aka the 'January 2024' update) saw Microsoft bump the minimum build requirements for the text editor's popular remote dev tools to â¥glibc 2.28 — but Ubuntu 18.04 LTS uses glibc 2.27, ergo they no longer work. While Ubuntu 18.04 is supported by Canonical until 2028 (through ESM) a major glibc upgrade is unlikely. Thus, this "breaking change" is truly breaking workflows... It seems affected developers were caught off-guard as this (rather impactful) change was not signposted before, during, or after the VS Code update (which is installed automatically for most, and the update was pushed out to Ubuntu 18.04 machines). Indeed, most only discovered this issue after update was installed, they tried to connect to a remote server, and discovered it failed. The resulting error message does mention deprecation and links to an FAQ on the VS Code website with workarounds (i.e. downgrade). But as one developer politely put it.... "It could have checked the libc versions and refused the update. Now, many people are screwed in the middle of their work." The article points out an upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will address the problem. On GitHub a Microsoft engineer posted additional options from VS Code's documentation: If you are unable to upgrade your Linux distribution, the recommended alternative is to use our web client. If you would like to use the desktop version, then you can download the VS Code release 1.85. Depending on your platform, make sure to disable updates to stay on that version. Microsoft then locked the thread on GitHub as "too heated" and limited conversation to just collaborators. In a related thread someone suggested installing VS Code's Flatpak, which was still on version 1.85 — and then disabling updates. But soon Microsoft had locked that thread as well as "too heated," again limiting conversation to collaborators.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/24/02/04/0116229 When you can't take criticism for a balls-up, lock the discussion thread! Hmm... 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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LibreOffice 24.2 Delivers Advanced Features and Global Accessibility
by Peter Reutemann 02 Feb '24

02 Feb '24

'The Document Foundation has officially launched LibreOffice 24.2, which is now available for download for Windows, macOS, and Linux platforms. This release introduces a new calendar-based version numbering system (YY.M). Here’s what it’s all about. The latest major release of the well-known office suite was 7.6. However, this is set to change with the introduction of 24.2, as the version numbering will now follow a “year.month” pattern, similar to that used by Ubuntu releases, for example. This change aims to simplify version identification for end users, making it more intuitive to understand.' -- source: https://linuxiac.com/libreoffice-24-2-delivers-advanced-features-and-global… ...and here I was, thinking that I missed a truckload of releases. :-) 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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