July 2026 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Blender Open Movie: Singularity
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Jul '26

30 Jul '26

The team behind the Blender 3D software regularly create “Open Movie” projects -- short features that act as a shakedown cruise for new functionality added to the latest versions of Blender. All the assets involved in the production are then made available for free reuse in users’ own projects. The latest one of these projects is a 6½-minute item with no spoken dialogue, called “Singularity” <https://studio.blender.org/projects/singularity/>. This accompanies the latest Blender release, version 5.2 as of a couple of weeks ago. 3D photorealism seems to be old hat now. The emphasis has moved to painterly effects, drawn images that derive from traditional 2D animation, but have subtle (or not-so-subtle) features that extend into the third dimension. This movie project also tests out features added to the image editor, video editor and compositor functions to deal with 4K HDR image frames.

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isc-dhcp-server
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Jul '26

30 Jul '26

After a Debian Unstable upgrade a couple of months ago, dhcpd (from the isc-dhcp-server package) would no longer start automatically. This is because it relies on a sysvinit startup script, and systemd has finally removed support for that. Looks like upstream development of that project has largely ceased, in favour of a more elaborate successor that I am in no hurry to switch to, for my simple home-internal needs. You can actually manually launch /usr/sbin/dhcpd as root and it will automatically fork a daemon process, but this got a bit tiresome. So I created a systemd service definition for it: [Unit] Description=ISC DHCP Server [Install] WantedBy=network.target [Service] Type=forking ExecStart=/usr/sbin/dhcpd TimeoutStopSec=5 Restart=always That’s just under a dozen lines, including blank ones -- not a bad replacement for a sysvinit script that is nearly 200 lines in size ...

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AI memory shortage is now increasing the price of cars
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 Jul '26

24 Jul '26

Who knew that electronic parts are now making up an appreciable part of the cost of a car <https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/ai-memory-shortage-is-now-in…>: Micron said in 2023 that the average vehicle used 90GB of DRAM and NAND, and it’s expecting this combined requirement to jump to 278GB by 2026, with high-end models requiring up to 2TB. A British OEM broke down the memory requirements of vehicles released this year — infotainment systems require between 4GB and 16GB, ADAS and safety systems need 8GB to 32GB, while centralized systems often have a minimum requirement of 16GB and could go as high as 64GB or more. This is even before you get into self-driving capability and other AI-type features: And as AI assistants start becoming available on cars, these systems will require at least 256GB of memory. In fact, Micron predicts that cars with level 4 autonomy will need at least 300GB of RAM, as they’re essentially supercomputers on wheels. Of course, these are all special ruggedized electronic components, built to withstand the more hostile conditions inside a vehicle, as opposed to a home or office environment.

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Rust Will Help Linux Succeed and Makes Coding Fun, Says Greg Kroah-Hartman
by Peter Reutemann 20 Jul '26

20 Jul '26

'ZDNet reports on June's Open Source Summit India 2026 in Mumbai, where Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman gave a talk titled "Rust and Linux: How the Rust Language is Going to Help Linux Succeed." Kroah-Hartman said in his keynote that "the [Linux] kernel is moving toward Rust. Git is moving toward Rust. Lots of projects are starting to move toward Rust." He didn't always feel that way. Kroah-Hartman added, "A number of years ago, when a friend of mine said, 'Ah, you got to try this new language. It's called Rust.' I was like, 'What? No, C is great.' His friend continued, "'No, no, no! It makes programming fun again.' I'm like, 'Nah, programming is fun in C.' He was right. I should have done it then. Rust is actually fun. It makes programming fun. It takes a lot of stuff away from having to worry about the compiler, which can fix a lot of your problems for you, and it makes code a little bit better." So, Kroah-Hartman has moved from being a Rust skeptic to one of its strongest champions inside the kernel. He now regards Rust as a permanent part of Linux, not an experiment. His case is straightforward: Rust's ownership and type system can eliminate most of the "stupid little tiny things" that dominate kernel Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), while making life easier for overworked maintainers. "Rust," in short, "makes my life so much easier...." In India, he said Linux sees "about 13 CVEs a day" and has been running at "almost nine changes an hour" for a decade or more. Most of those vulnerabilities, he argued, are not exotic attacks but simple C mistakes — unchecked pointers, forgotten unlocks, and sloppy cleanup paths: "This is what we're fixing 13 times a day. Small, trivial, little bugs like this all the time.... I've seen every CVE the kernel has done in the past 25 years. I think 80% would be gone, just because they would be caught by Rust." The remaining 20% are the logic bugs he'd prefer to focus on...." Moreover, Rust is becoming the default for new work in key subsystems. "New drivers for some subsystems are only going to be accepted in Rust...." he said. Binder, the Android IPC mechanism at the heart of billions of devices, now has parallel C and Rust implementations in the kernel. The C version "will go away soon," leaving the Rust version "as the bedrock of all Android devices going forward." ' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/07/20/0417244 Cheers, Peter

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Engineer Identifies & Explains Every ’90s Computer Seen In “Jurassic Park”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Jul '26

16 Jul '26

“This is a Unix system! I know this!” Every piece of computer hardware in the original “Jurassic Park” hardware was real -- loaned by the vendors for use in the film. In the blog post linked to in this report, Google engineer Fabien Sanglard goes through it all -- including of course the SGI machines that were the subject of the famous line above. <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/engineer-identifies-and-explains-ev…> (RIP Sam Neill)

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FreeBSD 16 Retires the Last of Its GPL Code
by Peter Reutemann 16 Jul '26

16 Jul '26

'FreeBSD 16 has removed the last GPL-licensed code from its base system, retiring the old GNU 'dialog' implementation after the installer moved to 'bsddialog' and the final dependency was disabled. Phoronix reports: This ticket to retire dialog was opened back in February while is now merged to the FreeBSD source tree for what will become FreeBSD 16.0. With dialog removed, the latest FreeBSD code now retires the GNU sub-tree of the FreeBSD base system now that no more GNU code remains. FreeBSD 16.0 is working its way toward release that is expected to happen in December 2027. ' -- source: https://bsd.slashdot.org/story/26/07/15/1727252 Cheers, Peter

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UC Mirror gone
by Peter Reutemann 16 Jul '26

16 Jul '26

Hi everyone For a long time, I've been using the mirror provided by the University of Canterbury (e.g., for Linux and cygwin): https://ucmirror.canterbury.ac.nz/ However, it looks like it got decommissioned very recently... :-( Cheers, Peter

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The Achilles Heel Of Secure Boot: Certificate Revocation
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Jul '26

15 Jul '26

Some years ago, I mentioned a report about a compromised boot image from Kaspersky labs; Microsoft initially issued a revocation of its Secure Boot Certificate, but then had to withdraw that because it caused so many problems for Windows users who couldn’t (or just wouldn’t) upgrade/replace the affected versions of Kaspersky products <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/new-flaw-neuters-sec…>. Now it turns out Microsoft has been negligent in revoking other certificates for ancient, compromised, obsolete bootloader “shims” <https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/07/microsoft-secure-boot-has-been-bro…> -- even when the repercussions of doing so would be minor, there still didn’t seem to be the will to promptly enforce the rules that the company itself created. Certificate revocation in the event of a security compromise is also a measure used in another context: with TLS/SSL certificates for securely accessing websites. In this situation, it has long been known to be a troublesome and unreliable mechanism. And so something called “OCSP” was invented as a kind of workaround, only to fall victim to its own problems. Which is why, in the TLS/SSL world, the general consensus is that the only reliable solution nowadays is to drastically shorten the validity interval of the certificates -- some are suggesting they should be valid for no longer than a week -- so the problem is (mostly) solved simply by reducing the opportunity for malicious parties to make use of compromised certificates. This solution doesn’t seem practical for Secure Boot keys, which have to be stored in UEFI flash RAM on every PC ... or could something like it be made to work? But then again, is this just another item to add to the pile of evidence that Secure Boot might be more trouble than it’s worth? From the recent article: The prospect that attackers have had the means to bypass Secure Boot for more than a decade through what amounts to hack-by-numbers scripts isn’t much of an endorsement of the mechanism proposed by Microsoft in partnership with hardware makers. As mentioned earlier, a key contributor to this debacle is its complexity. “This is a solid rebuke of the entire secure boot model,” HD Moore, a firmware security expert, CEO and founder of runZero, and a long-time critic of Secure Boot, said in an interview. His complaints include Microsoft being the de facto root of trust for the entire UEFI platform, the inability of the protection to scale sufficiently, and the ability for components to boot even after top-level certificates expire.

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If You Buy Something, Do You Own It? Maybe Not In The USA, But ...
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Jul '26

12 Jul '26

Two interesting legal cases, one in Brazil <https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/xbox/brazilian-court-orders-micros…>, and the other in China <https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/chinese-courts-allow-he…> seem to affirm that buyers do indeed have property rights in console games that they buy -- at least in certain countries outside the USA. The first case did seem somewhat unfair: Microsoft permanently suspended a person’s account, supposedly because of a security breach (the authentication information had been changed -- presumbly in a suspicious way?). This meant loss of all purchases tied to that account--permanently. They refused to lift the suspension, saying the user had to create a new account and buy all the games over again. Not good enough, ruled the small-claims tribunal. The Chinese case has decided that relatives can inherit the game accounts of deceased users, just like any other property. Well, you know, companies *will* insist on using the term “intellectual property” for their control over these assets, won’t they? If it’s “property” to one side, why not to the other side as well?

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Disable autoplay and infinite scroll or risk massive fines, EU tells Meta
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Jul '26

11 Jul '26

Social media networks are optimized for what they call “engagement” -- that is features that, by their nature, almost invariably lead to addictive behaviour from their users. Because that is an inseparable part of the mechanism by which they earn their revenue. Now the EU regulatory authorities are taking direct aim at these very features of those networks <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/disable-auto-play-and-infinite-…>. Can it succeed in reining them in?

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