July 2025 - 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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Blender 5.0 Introducing HDR Support On Linux With Vulkan + Wayland
by Peter Reutemann 29 Oct '25

29 Oct '25

'Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: The upcoming Blender 5.0 3D modeling software application is introducing High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support on Linux when making use of Wayland -- no X11 support for HDR -- and Vulkan graphics accelerator. HDR support for Blender 5.0 on Linux is currently considered experimental. Enabling the HDR support on Linux for the Blender creator software requires having a High Dynamic Range display (of course) and be running on a Wayland desktop, enabling Vulkan API acceleration rather than OpenGL, and enabling the feature currently deemed experimental. ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/06/26/2035245 Cheers, Peter

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Games Run Faster On SteamOS Than Windows 11, Ars Testing Finds
by Peter Reutemann 16 Oct '25

16 Oct '25

'A report from Ars Technica: Nearly a decade ago, Ars testing found that Valve's "Steam Machines"-era version of SteamOS performed significantly worse than Windows when SteamOS's Linux game ports were tested on the same hardware as their Windows counterparts. Today, though, Ars testing on the Lenovo Legion Go S finds recent games generally run at higher frame rates on SteamOS 3.7 than on Windows 11. [...] As you can see in the included charts, SteamOS showed noticeable frame rate improvements in four of the five games tested. Only Borderlands 3 showed comparable performance across both operating systems, with Windows eking out ever-so-slightly higher frame rates in that game's benchmarks. For the other four tested games, the stock Lenovo Windows drivers were sometimes significantly worse than those included with SteamOS. When playing Returnal at "High" graphics presets and 1920x1200 resolution, for instance, changing from Lenovo's Windows drivers to SteamOS meant the difference between a hard-to-take 18 FPS average and a downright decent 33 FPS average. Sideloading the updated Asus drivers showed a noticeable improvement in Windows performance across all tested games and even brought Homeworld 3's "Low" graphics benchmark test to practical parity with SteamOS. In all other cases, though, even these updated drivers resulted in benchmark frame rates anywhere from 8 percent to 36 percent lower than those same benchmarks on SteamOS. These results might seem a bit counterintuitive, considering that games running on SteamOS must go through a Proton translation layer for every native Windows instruction in a game's code. But Valve has put in consistent work over the years to make Proton as efficient and cross-compatible as possible; not to mention its continued work on Linux's Mesa graphics drivers seems to be paying dividends for SteamOS graphics performance. Running SteamOS also means eliminating a lot of operating system overhead that the more generalist Windows uses by default. Microsoft seems aware of this issue for gamers and has recently announced that the upcoming "Xbox Experience for Handheld" will "minimize background activity and defer non-essential tasks" to allow for "more [and] higher framerates" in games.' -- source: https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/06/25/2034243 Cheers, Peter

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Blender 4.5 LTS Released
by Peter Reutemann 05 Aug '25

05 Aug '25

'NERDS.xyz reports: Blender 4.5 has arrived and it's a long-term support release. That means users get two full years of updates and bug fixes, making it a smart choice for anyone looking for stability in serious projects. Whether you're a solo artist or part of a studio pipeline, this version is built to last. Here's a list of key features and changes in this release: - Vulkan backend replaces OpenGL (faster, smoother UI) - Adaptive subdivision up to 14x faster with multithreading - New Geometry Nodes: Camera Info, Instance Bounds - GPU-accelerated compositor nodes with standardized inputs - New Boolean solver: Manifold (cleaner, faster mesh operations) - UV maps visible in Object Mode + improved selection behavior - Grease Pencil render pass and Geometry Nodes integration - Improved file import support: PLY, OBJ, STL, CSV, VDB - Deprecations: Collada, Big Endian, legacy .blend, Intel Mac support - Cycles OptiX now requires NVIDIA driver v535+ - New shader variants for add-on developers (POLYLINES_*, POINT_*) ~500 bug fixes across all major systems' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/07/15/1912208 Cheers, Peter

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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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Debian isn't waiting for 2038 to blow up, switches to 64-bit time for everything
by Peter Reutemann 31 Jul '25

31 Jul '25

'Venerable Linux distribution Debian is side-stepping the Y2K38 bug – also known as the Unix Epochalypse – by switching to 64-bit time for everything but the oldest of supported hardware, starting with the upcoming Debian 13 "Trixie" release. "[We will] use 64-bit time_t on 32-bit architectures to avoid the 'year 2038 problem' when the existing 32-bit signed int rolls over (potentially setting time back to 1900)," the Debian maintainers say of the move and the problem it aims to fix. y2k illustration retro futuristic The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers READ MORE "This is now less than 15 years away and plenty of systems that will have problems have already been shipped. We should stop adding to the problem." Readers of a certain vintage will remember well the "Y2K problem," caused by retrospectively shortsighted attempts to save a couple of bytes by using two-digit years – meaning that "2000" is represented as "00" and assumed to be "1900." While predictions of aircraft falling from the skies and bank balances being wiped out by negative-decades of interest did not, thankfully, come true, that was purely due to the tireless behind-the-scenes work of software developers who were able to patch affected systems before celebrating the turn of the century. There's another, less well-known clock problem looming, however: the Unix Epochalypse,which affects any systems that measure time the Unix way – in seconds elapsed since January 1, 1970. Come the very precise time of 03:14:07 UTC on January 19, 2038, the number of seconds elapsed will be larger than can be represented by a signed 32-bit integer. This would be fine if the decision hadn't been made all those years ago to store the number of seconds in exactly such a format.' -- source: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/y2k38_bug_debian/ Cheers, Peter

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Malware Discovered in Arch Linux AUR Packages
by Peter Reutemann 28 Jul '25

28 Jul '25

Something for the arch users on here: 'If you are an Arch user, you know – AUR (Arch User Repository) is a double-edged sword—it’s incredibly useful but requires caution. Unfortunately, that caution was warranted yet again this week when three AUR packages were found to contain malware. The issue came to light on July 16 when a user uploaded a malicious package, librewolf-fix-bin, to the AUR. Within hours, two more packages—firefox-patch-bin and zen-browser-patched-bin—followed, all traced back to the same bad actor. Security researchers quickly identified the threat: a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) hidden in a script pulled from a GitHub repository. For those unfamiliar, a RAT is no joke—it can grant attackers full control over an infected system, enabling them to steal data, install additional malware, or spy on users. Thankfully, the Arch Linux security team responded promptly as soon as they became aware of the issue. By July 18, all three malicious packages had been removed from AUR.' -- source: https://linuxiac.com/malware-discovered-in-arch-linux-aur-packages/ Cheers, Peter

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Clear Linux Discontinued as Intel Pulls the Plug Overnight
by Peter Reutemann 28 Jul '25

28 Jul '25

'Unfortunately, there’s a bit of sad news out of the Linux world this week, with Clear Linux taking center stage. What I’m talking about is that Intel has formally ended support for Clear Linux OS, drawing a rapid close to a nearly decade-long effort to showcase aggressive, upstream-friendly performance optimizations on x86_64. In a blog post titled “All good things come to an end: Shutting down Clear Linux OS,” the announcement states that support ends immediately, with no trailing window for security updates. "After years of innovation and community collaboration, we’re ending support for Clear Linux OS. Effective immediately, Intel will no longer provide security patches, updates, or maintenance for Clear Linux OS, and the Clear Linux OS GitHub repository will be archived in read-only mode." Crucially, “effective immediately” is not rhetorical: Intel states that there will be no further security patches, updates, or maintenance, and the project’s GitHub repository is to be archived in a read-only manner. As you can guess, that abrupt cutoff leaves any production or lab systems running Clear Linux exposed going forward, so administrators now face an urgent migration. For those unfamiliar, Clear Linux (a project launched in 2015) is an open-source, rolling-release Linux distribution developed by Intel’s Open Source Technology Center, purpose-built to showcase and leverage Intel’s hardware strengths, with a focus on high performance, security, and cloud-native workloads. -- source: https://linuxiac.com/intel-shuts-down-clear-linux-os/ Cheers, Peter

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Let Sudo Insult You When You Enter Incorrect Password
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jul '25

24 Jul '25

Add some spice to your incorrect password attempts! :-) 'Sudoers is the default sudo security policy plugin in Linux; however, experienced system administrators can specify a custom security policy as well as input and output logging plugins. It is driven by the /etc/sudoers file or, alternatively by LDAP. You can define sudoers options like the insults option or several others in the file /etc/sudoers. It is set under the Defaults entries section. [...] In this article, we will explain a sudoers configuration parameter to enable an individual or system administrator to set sudo command to insult system users who enter the wrong password.' -- source: https://www.tecmint.com/sudo-insult-when-enter-wrong-password/ Cheers, Peter

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FossFLOW - Isometric Diagramming Tool
by Peter Reutemann 23 Jul '25

23 Jul '25

Just came across FossFLOW: 'FossFLOW is a powerful, open-source Progressive Web App (PWA) for creating beautiful isometric diagrams. Built with React and the Isoflow (Now forked and published to NPM as fossflow) library, it runs entirely in your browser with offline support.' You can try it out here: https://stan-smith.github.io/FossFLOW/ Maybe something to consider next time you create a diagram? :-) -- code: https://github.com/stan-smith/FossFLOW -- source: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/114897260096883374 Cheers, Peter

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