July 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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Juice TV Hiccup
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Oct '24

15 Oct '24

Currently when I switch to FreeView Channel 200, it shows a frozen image with the text “Cinegy” and “Demo Version” on it. Searching for that name takes me to a site that talks about “software defined television”. Either their product licence has expired, or they never had one in the first place ...

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List Of IPTV Resources
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 22 Sep '24

22 Sep '24

This user <https://github.com/iptv-org> just popped up in my GitHub feed. One repo <https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv> claims to be a list of links to over 8000 streaming TV channels from nations all over the world, while the other is a list of tools*, providers and other resources. Do be aware it’s a bit of a mixed bag: yes, there are legitimate channels (no encryption so far that I have noticed), but also some dubious-looking links. *Oddly, FFmpeg and youtube-dl aren’t in the list.

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“In the future, computers may weigh no more than 1.5 tonnes.”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Aug '24

01 Aug '24

Nice collection of vintage computer pics/clips, along with some pithy quotes from the times (1945-1990). Which ones can you identify without looking at the captions? <https://www.docubyte.com/projects/guide-to-computing/>

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The Unintended Consequences Linux’s Wayland Adoption Will Have on BSD
by Peter Reutemann 31 Jul '24

31 Jul '24

'Like most people who use Linux as their daily driver, I’ve been pleased lately to see that Wayland is finally getting some serious traction and is on its way to being the default display server for most mainstream Linux distributions. It’s been a long trip from the days when we first heard that X was on its way out and that Wayland was on its way in — 15 years as a matter of fact — so the better performance, more svelte code base, enhanced security, and all of the other advantages that Wayland brings to the table being just about here for some of us, and already here for others, is indeed good news. But before we pop the cork on the champagne bottles and start the celebrations, perhaps we should consider that this good news for Linux might not be good news for those running BSD or one of the Unixes, which is something that normally would never occur to me to think about since I’ve never tried to use BSD. The only reason I’m thinking about it now is because this weekend I ran across a post by Chris Siebenmann, a Unix systems administrator at the University of Toronto’s CS Labs. Being a Unix guy by day (and I suspect a BSD guy by night), he’s all on what Wayland on Linux means to BSD/Unix stuck on X, and he’s been thinking about what Linux’s move to Wayland is going to mean for desktop BSDs and Unixes. “Once upon a time, the future of Unix desktops looked fairly straightforward,” he wrote. “Everyone ran on X, so the major threat to cross-Unix portability in major desktops was the use of Linux only APIs, which became especially D-Bus and systemd related things. Unix desktops that were less attached to tight integration with the Linux environment would probably stay easily available on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and so on.” The main thing I got from that is that for a long time, the BSDs have benefited somewhat from Linux. In this case, because both operating systems use X, it was relatively easy (“relatively” probably being the key word here) to port most popular “Linux” desktop environments to BSD. The trouble is, according to Siebenmann, those days might be coming to an end.' -- source: https://fossforce.com/2024/07/the-unintended-consequences-linuxs-wayland-ad… Cheers, Peter

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LZ4 Compression Algorithm Gets Multi-Threaded Update
by Peter Reutemann 29 Jul '24

29 Jul '24

'Slashdot reader Seven Spirals brings news about the lossless compression algorithm LZ4: The already wonderful performance of the LZ4 compressor just got better with multi-threaded additions to it's codebase. In many cases, LZ4 can compress data faster than it can be written to disk giving this particular compressor some very special applications. The Linux kernel as well as filesystems like ZFS use LZ4 compression extensively. This makes LZ4 more comparable to the Zstd compression algorithm, which has had multi-threaded performance for a while, but cannot match the LZ4 compressor for speed, though it has some direct LZ4. >From Linuxiac.com: - On Windows 11, using an Intel 7840HS CPU, compression time has improved from 13.4 seconds to just 1.8 seconds — a 7.4 times speed increase. - macOS users with the M1 Pro chip will see a reduction from 16.6 seconds to 2.55 seconds, a 6.5 times faster performance. - For Linux users on an i7-9700k, the compression time has been reduced from 16.2 seconds to 3.05 seconds, achieving a 5.4 times speed boost... The release supports lesser-known architectures such as LoongArch, RISC-V, and others, ensuring LZ4's portability across various platforms. ' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/07/28/0057247 Cheers, Peter

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What Happens If You Connect Windows XP To the Internet In 2024?
by Peter Reutemann 29 Jul '24

29 Jul '24

'Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger writes: Have you ever wondered if it's true you can instantly get malware? In this video, a person connects an XP instance directly to the internet with no firewall to see just how fast it gets compromised by malware, rootkits, malicious services and new user accounts. The answer — fast! Malwarebytes eventually finds eight different viruses/Trojan horses -- and a DNS changer. (One IP address leads back to the Russian federation.) It's fun to watch -- within just a few hours a new Windows user has even added themself. And for good measure, he also opens up Internet Explorer... - Windows XP -- very insecure, they conclude at the end of the video. Very easy for random software from the internet to get more privileges than you, and it is very hard to solve that. - Also, just out of curiosity I tried this on Windows 7. And even with all of the same settings, nothing happened. I let it run for 10 hours. So it seems like this may be a problem in historical Windows.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/07/28/2137216 Cheers, Peter

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Secure Boot is completely broken on 200+ models from 5 big device makers
by Peter Reutemann 26 Jul '24

26 Jul '24

'On Thursday, researchers from security firm Binarly revealed that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro. The cause: a cryptographic key underpinning Secure Boot on those models that was compromised in 2022. In a public GitHub repository committed in December of that year, someone working for multiple US-based device manufacturers published what’s known as a platform key, the cryptographic key that forms the root-of-trust anchor between the hardware device and the firmware that runs on it. The repository was located at https://github.com/raywu-aaeon/Ryzen2000_4000.git, and it's not clear when it was taken down. The repository included the private portion of the platform key in encrypted form. The encrypted file, however, was protected by a four-character password, a decision that made it trivial for Binarly, and anyone else with even a passing curiosity, to crack the passcode and retrieve the corresponding plain text. The disclosure of the key went largely unnoticed until January 2023, when Binarly researchers found it while investigating a supply-chain incident. Now that the leak has come to light, security experts say it effectively torpedoes the security assurances offered by Secure Boot. “It’s a big problem,” said Martin Smolár, a malware analyst specializing in rootkits who reviewed the Binarly research and spoke to me about it. “It’s basically an unlimited Secure Boot bypass for these devices that use this platform key. So until device manufacturers or OEMs provide firmware updates, anyone can basically… execute any malware or untrusted code during system boot. Of course, privileged access is required, but that’s not a problem in many cases.”' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/07/secure-boot-is-completely-compromi… Cheers, Peter

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