March 2026 - 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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I tried to prove I'm not AI. My aunt wasn't convinced
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Mar '26

30 Mar '26

A BBC correspondent talks to some AI experts on ways that people can be sure they’re talking to the real you and not an AI. The consensus is: the fakes are so good now, there is no way even for the experts to be completely sure, when communicating with someone remotely, that they are genuine, just from the content alone. Apart from meeting in person, the only sure way is to apply authentication methods already in common use for secure logins to remote services. Only now the definition of “remote service” has to broadened to “talking to your friends”. <https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260324-i-tried-to-prove-im-not-an-ai-d…>

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Linux Maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman Says AI Tools Now Useful, Finding Real Bugs
by Peter Reutemann 30 Mar '26

30 Mar '26

'Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman tells The Register that AI-driven code review has "really jumped" for Linux. "There must have been some inflection point somewhere with the tools..." "Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports." It's not just Linux, he continued. "All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real." Security teams across major open source projects talk informally and frequently, he noted, and everyone is seeing the same shift. "All open source security teams are hitting this right now...." For now, AI is showing up more as a reviewer and assistant than as a full author of Linux kernel code, but that line is starting to blur. Kroah-Hartman has already done his own experiments with AI-generated patches. "I did a really stupid prompt," he recounted. "I said, 'Give me this,' and it spit out 60: 'Here's 60 problems I found, and here's the fixes for them.' About one-third were wrong, but they still pointed out a relatively real problem, and two-thirds of the patches were right." Mind you, those working patches still needed human cleanup, better changelogs, and integration work, but they were far from useless. "The tools are good," he said. "We can't ignore this stuff. It's coming up, and it's getting better...." [H]e said that for "simple little error conditions, properly detecting error conditions," AI could already generate dozens of usable patches today. The sudden increase in AI-generated reports and AI-assisted work has also spurred a parallel push to build AI into the kernel's own review infrastructure. A key piece of that is Sashiko, a tool originally developed at Google and now donated to the Linux Foundation. Kroah-Hartman said some patches are being generated with AI now. "You have a little co-develop tag for that now. We're seeing some things for some new features, but we're seeing AI mostly being used in the review."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/26/03/28/0717258 Cheers, Peter

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A Homegrown Excel Bug?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Mar '26

26 Mar '26

A correction to MBIE’s report on current fuel reserves <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/mbie-clarifies-fuel-data-showing-far…> adds a previously-missing column showing ships that are currently “discharging” their fuel load. This gives an extra 16 days’ supply of diesel that was previously reported as only on its way here, not actually here. How do you miss out a column from a report? Answers on a postcard, please ...

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Wine 11 Rewrites How Linux Runs Windows Games At the Kernel Level
by Peter Reutemann 25 Mar '26

25 Mar '26

'Linux gamers are seeing massive performance gains with Wine's new NTSYNC support, "which is a feature that has been years in the making and rewrites how Wine handles one of the most performance-sensitive operations in modern gaming," reports XDA Developers. Not every game will see a night-and-day difference, but for the games that do benefit from these changes, "the improvements range from noticeable to absurd." Combined with improvements to Wayland, graphics, and compatibility, as well as a major WoW64 architecture overhaul, the release looks less like an incremental update and more like one of Wine's most important upgrades in years. From the report: The numbers are wild. In developer benchmarks, Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS, which is an impressive 678% improvement. Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS. Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS. As well, Call of Duty: Black Ops I is now actually playable on Linux, too. Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there's no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games. The games that benefit most from NTSYNC are the ones that were struggling before, such as titles with heavy multi-threaded workloads where the synchronization overhead was a genuine bottleneck. For those games, the difference is night and day. And unlike fsync, NTSYNC is in the mainline kernel, meaning you don't need any custom patches or out-of-tree modules for it work. Any distro shipping kernel 6.14 or later, which at this point includes Fedora 42, Ubuntu 25.04, and more recent releases, will support it. Valve has already added the NTSYNC kernel driver to SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, loading the module by default, and an unofficial Proton fork, Proton GE, already has it enabled. When Valve's official Proton rebases on Wine 11, every Steam Deck owner gets this for free. All of this is what makes NTSYNC such a big deal, as it's not simply a run-of-the-mill performance patch. Instead, it's something much bigger: this is the first time Wine's synchronization has been correct at the kernel level, implemented in the mainline Linux kernel, and available to everyone without jumping through hoops. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/03/24/1946246 Cheers, Peter

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MultiTail
by Peter Reutemann 16 Mar '26

16 Mar '26

Just came across this post/tutorial on MultiTail: 'MultiTail is a powerful terminal-based utility that allows you to view multiple log files simultaneously in a single terminal window. Think of it as tail -f on steroids. Instead of opening several terminal tabs or splitting your screen with tmux, MultiTail creates dynamically managed panes inside one terminal session. Each pane can follow a different file, command output, or even network stream. At its core, MultiTail is designed to: - Monitor multiple log files at once - Display them in split windows - Apply colorization rules - Merge multiple files into one unified view - Filter content live - Follow new files dynamically' -- source: https://idolinux.com/multitail-what-it-is-and-how-it-can-make-you-a-better-… Cheers, Peter

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Keep Android Open
by Michael Doerner | TechnologyWise 08 Mar '26

08 Mar '26

Any suggestions who to address, where to go to with this in NZ? https://keepandroidopen.org/

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Norwegian Consumer Council PSA -- In English! (Language Warning)
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Mar '26

06 Mar '26

The Norwegian Consumer Council (Forbrukerrådet) has released a wickedly funny skit (in English, even) warning against products that start out attractive and fun to use, but then get enshittified with extra-cost “options” that turn out not to be so “optional”. And yes, they use the word a lot. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ>

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A Taste Of CDE
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 02 Mar '26

02 Mar '26

An emulation of an early-1990s Linux GUI in a browser <https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/nostalgic-developer-recreates-t…>. Actually, who says CDE was ever “dead”? GNU created their own version of the OSF Motif GUI toolkit, called “Lesstif”, and it continues to be available in Linux distros to this day.

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