April 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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Framework CEO Reviews Framework Laptop 12 versus Apple MacBook Neo
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Apr '26

29 Apr '26

Quite a lot of hardware detail in this half-hour video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvYt1GgcsUI>, in which Framework CEO Nirav Patel, assisted by Izzy, his hardware product manager, do side-by-side teardowns of their company’s Laptop 12 model and Apple’s new MacBook Neo. He does try not to let his bias show *too* much, by being complimentary to the Neo’s better screen, and also by being reasonably even-handed in his discussion of respective design tradeoffs (just compare the size of the two different mainboards, for -- to me at least -- the most dramatic example of this). Both target the sub-US$1000 market, but of course they do it in very different ways: the whole philosophy of Framework is to keep things modular for easy repair and upgradeability, while Apple has traditionally taken a “keep out” attitude to would-be do-it-yourself hardware tinkerers. It appears, though that the Neo represents a shift in this attitude somewhat -- not that Apple has much choice, with new EU rules on minimizing e-waste coming into effect. Plus of course the political pressure from consumer-driven right-to-repair movements on both sides of the Atlantic. He talks at the end about an emphasis on the education market -- a market which Apple dominated back in the last century, but gave up somewhat in the last couple of decades. Seems like the Neo might represent an attempt by Apple to reestablish a presence here, while Patel says he is already getting lots of queries from schools looking to save costs by buying more easily repairable products.

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Phrase Of The Week: “Distillation Attack”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 28 Apr '26

28 Apr '26

It’s not enough that the creators of the AI models have scraped information from millions of websites to build their systems, now they have to worry about competitors short-circuiting the process by extracting information wholesale from their models, by making hundreds or thousands of requests and combining the results. This is called a “distillation attack”. Some AI service providers try to say this is against their terms and conditions, but how do you define what is and isn’t allowed, exactly? <https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/attackers-prompted-gemini-over-100000-ti…>: In March 2023, shortly after Meta’s LLaMA model weights leaked online, Stanford University researchers built a model called Alpaca by fine-tuning LLaMA on 52,000 outputs generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5. The total cost was about $600. The result behaved so much like ChatGPT that it raised immediate questions about whether any AI model’s capabilities could be protected once it was accessible through an API. A big worry in the US now is that China is doing this to train its AI models <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/04/us-accuses-china-of-industrial-…>. And of course, as soon as it is seen as a “national security” issue, they start to lobby the politicians to pass laws against it. Imagine that: making too much use of the service, or prompting it according to certain forbidden patterns, could now become criminal violations of laws such as the Economic Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Another quote from the February article: As long as an LLM is accessible to the public, no foolproof technical barrier prevents a determined actor from doing the same thing to someone else’s model over time (though rate-limiting helps), which is exactly what Google says happened to Gemini

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Framework’s CEO on the RAM crisis and creating a “MacBook Pro for Linux users”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Apr '26

23 Apr '26

Interview with Framework CEO Nirav Patel <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/frameworks-ceo-on-the-ram-crisis-an…>. Framework, the maker of configurable laptops, is naturally a Linux-heavy, but not a Linux-exclusive, company: “... on Framework Laptop 13, we actually have slightly more Linux users than Windows users. It’s something like 55/45 [Linux versus Windows] on the 13. It varies on our different products. The [Framework Laptop] 16 is a bit more Windows heavy.” Also: The company is also trying to capture Mac users, which was one reason Framework shifted from a trackpad with a physical clicking mechanism to a haptic trackpad like the ones Apple has used in most MacBooks over the past decade. Yes, there are actually enough Mac users that want to switch to Framework machines, for this to matter. And the headline quote: “Increasingly over the last five years, especially software developers come in because they want Linux and they want it on hardware that supports it as a first-class experience,” Patel told Ars. “And so really a lot of the philosophy behind the [Framework Laptop 13] Pro was ‘let’s build essentially the MacBook Pro for Linux users. Let’s take the software that they want, the distro that they prefer, and then make sure that the hardware experience lives up to what they would expect coming from a MacBook Pro.’”

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IPv6 Marches On
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Apr '26

17 Apr '26

Some interesting stats from <https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/ipv6-usage-reaches-historic-50-perc…>: • 50% of users of Google’s services connect over IPv6 • 43% of the world uses IPv6, with some parts approaching 50% • Cloudflare reports 40% of its traffic is done via IPv6 Choice quote: Some people still think that the additional 20 bytes or so of an IPv6 packet header translates to significant bandwidth losses, higher CPU usage, and hair loss. The reality is that even 11 years ago, Facebook's tests saw that IPv6 connectivity was around 10-15% faster overall, while networking giant Akamai noticed a 5% speedup in mobile page loading. The speedups are almost assuredly due to the fact that with IPv6, there's very little need to do math with NAT, proxies, and other shenanigans, as in most instances, everything can directly connect to everything else.

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Linux 7.0 Released
by Peter Reutemann 14 Apr '26

14 Apr '26

'"The new Linux kernel was released and it's kind of a big deal," writes longtime Slashdot reader rexx mainframe. "Here is what you can expect." Linuxiac reports: A key update in Linux 7.0 is the removal of the experimental label from Rust support. That (of course) does not make Rust a dominant language in kernel development, but it is still an important step in its gradual integration into the project. Another notable security-related change is the addition of ML-DSA post-quantum signatures for kernel module authentication, while support for SHA-1-based module-signing schemes has been removed. The kernel now includes BPF-based filtering for io_uring operations, providing administrators with improved control in restricted environments. Additionally, BTF type lookups are now faster due to binary search. At the same time, this release continues ongoing cleanup in the kernel's lower layers. The removal of linuxrc initrd code advances the transition to initramfs as the sole early-userspace boot mechanism. Linux 7.0 also introduces NULLFS, an immutable and empty root filesystem designed for systems that mount the real root later. Plus, preemption handling is now simpler on most architectures, with further improvements to restartable sequences, workqueues, RCU internals, slab allocation, and type-based hardening. Filesystems and storage receive several updates as well. Non-blocking timestamp updates now function correctly, and filesystems must explicitly opt in to leases rather than receiving them by default. Phoronix has compiled a list of the many exciting changes. Linus Torvalds himself announced the release, which can be downloaded directly from his git tree or from the kernel.org website. Linux 7.0 has a major new version number but it's "largely a numbering reset [...], not a sign of some unusually disruptive release," notes Linuxiac.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/26/04/13/1857240/linux-70-released Cheers, Peter

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Steam On Linux Use Skyrocketed In March - More Than Double The macOS Gaming Marketshare
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 04 Apr '26

04 Apr '26

I keep thinking: if the number of Linux-based users of Steam is so much greater than those using macOS, doesn’t that mean that the size of the overall desktop Linux installed base is now larger than that of macOS? Because otherwise, macOS users must be somehow less fun-loving that Linux users ... which seems hard to accept. <https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-On-Linux-Tops-5p>

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Google Groups Spam
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 03 Apr '26

03 Apr '26

I thought Google Groups was defunct. But it appears it is still possible for people to use it to set up mailing lists. I have been receiving a certain amount of spam sent via this mechanism over the past couple of weeks: what seems to happen is that the spammer registers a random domain and sets Google to manage email for that domain, creates a list on Google Groups with an address on that domain, subscribes a bunch of victims to it, then sends out their junk mail with the from-address set to the list address. Several of those addresses have autoreply set (e.g. tech support addresses), so they in turn send those autoreplies to the list address, which adds to the spam. Thankfully, there don’t seem to be autoreplies to their autoreplies, so at least things don’t spiral completely out of control ... What I have found is that all these messages have a common characteristic, namely a “List-Unsubscribe” header line which contains an address like “<mailto:googlegroups-manage+«blah-blah»+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com>”. Checking a few other mailing lists I’m on (like this one), they have entirely different addresses in this field. So, following some instructions in the Postfix documentation, I have added a “header_checks” map to my MTA configuration, containing the rule /^List-Unsubscribe\:\s*.*\@googlegroups\.com REJECT I always feel a little nervous about these sorts of email-related changes, since it’s so easy to stuff something up and block receipt of all mail altogether. I’ll feel reassured by seeing this posting to the mailing list come back to me. ;)

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Open Source: This Is Not How It Works
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 03 Apr '26

03 Apr '26

The Europeans want to create their own open-source office suite, to get away from the whims of some US-based proprietary company -- a commendable goal. They are using the OnlyOffice source code as their starting point -- maybe not so commendable. Seems the OnlyOffice folks are not happy over this <https://www.computerworld.com/article/4153893/onlyoffice-accuses-euro-offic…>. Trouble is, I don’t see how they can have a point. They license the source code under the AGPL, a licence that I have some qualms about. But nevertheless, people are free to take the code under this licence and do whatever they like with it, subject to the terms of the licence. From the article: OnlyOffice said in blog post that those accessing its code under this license are required to abide by conditions, such as retaining OnlyOffice’s branding and “providing proper attribution to the original technology.” OnlyOffice said that Euro-Office doesn’t meet these conditions, and therefore “any further use of the software is unauthorized and, as such, constitutes an infringement of the copyright holder’s exclusive rights.” The company also claims it was not contacted about the Euro-Office project prior to launch. But open-source licences don’t require any such conditions: there is no need to preserve any such “branding” (in fact, some trademark owners insist that these be removed in any forks), and there is no need to seek additional agreement from the copyright owners before performing actions that are permitted under the licence anyway. Copyright notices must be kept, anyway, but I can’t believe the Europeans were planning on removing those.

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