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

New Technique Save AI Tokens
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 09 Jul '26

09 Jul '26

Talk like caveman, forego grammatical niceties, maybe make heap big AI-usage cost savings <https://www.infoworld.com/article/4193775/talk-like-a-caveman-prompts-save-…>. Or maybe not.

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Zombie 'Who Owns Unix?' Lawsuit Comes Alive Again
by Peter Reutemann 07 Jul '26

07 Jul '26

'The long-running SCO/IBM Unix and Linux ownership dispute has resurfaced yet again, this time through SCO successor Xinuos, which is trying to pursue old license and copyright claims tied to Project Monterey. "The core issue seems to be whether Xinuos even has the right to litigate the matter, or if some ancient legalese in the original agreements means the window for legal argument has long since expired," reports The Register. From the report: [T]he roots of the case are the 1998 alliance between IBM and a company called the Santa Cruz Operation which sold a version of UNIX for x86 CPUs. Those two companies, plus Intel and Sequent, created "Project Monterey" -- an effort to create a unified version of UNIX that could run on multiple processors. By 2001, Project Monterey was close to delivering a unified UNIX, an achievement made possible by blending code from IBM and SCO. By then, a little project called "Linux" already ran on multiple processors. Big Blue decided Linux was the future and bailed from Project Monterey -- then allegedly contributed some Monterey code to the open-source project and to its own AIX and Z operating systems. SCO felt it owned some of that code, so sued IBM. SCO and its successors struggled to survive, but interested parties kept the lawsuit alive because the chance to emerge as owner of parts of the Linux codebase, and IBM's code, had the potential to turn into a colossal payday. The case and its successors ended in 2021, with a settlement that saw litigants agree to end the matter without IBM admitting fault. But by then, SCO had sold its software to a biz called Xinuos that decided to fight on. The Xinuos case has burbled along quietly since, and on June 22nd reached the milestone of a hearing. The matter has become a little more modern, if only because this hearing was held online and the presiding judge appeared to unwittingly be on mute at one point. But the arguments otherwise seemed to revisit Project Monterey, debated the relevance of past litigation, contested who owned what, when they owned it, and how they could prove it. Xinuos argued IBM never had a license for SCO code. Big Blue argued that it did nothing wrong. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/07/06/1844204 Cheers, Peter

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WSL keeps getting better, and it's because Microsoft is finally admitting where developers want to be
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 05 Jul '26

05 Jul '26

Delicious bit of commentary <https://www.xda-developers.com/wsl-keeps-getting-better-and-its-because-mic…> on what the new version 3 of Microsoft’s Windows Services for Linux means for the software development landscape. So what is happening? Microsoft is now offering Coreutils (the main core set of Linux command-line tools) for Windows. And by popular demand, you don’t even need to have WSL present in order to install it on your Windows system now. And if you have WSL, you can now run Docker containers without having to add any other tooling. Problem, though: ... Microsoft really does need to make its OS comfortable for Linux developers to work in, because the alternative involves people ditching Windows entirely. For Microsoft to maintain its user base, it has to ensure that its operating system can do everything better than its competitors, and if that includes allowing people to code Linux apps instead of using its own tools, then that's what it needs to do. But if what its operating system is supposedly “doing better than competitors” is “running a Linux stack”, then pretty much by definition, native Linux itself will always do that better than any Windows-with-Linux-bag-hanging-off-the-side two-headed FrankenOS can manage. But yes, a hybrid environment does at least offer some sense of familiarity to those who have spent too long in the Windows world -- easier than jumping straight into the deep end of a pure-Linux environment. In other words, all Microsoft can do, really, is help ease the transition away from Windows to Linux. Instead of slowing the move by making the Windows environment more attractive to stay with for just a little bit longer, it could, paradoxically, help to speed it up. The final section heading spells it out: “WSL is Microsoft admitting that developers want to be elsewhere”. No two ways about it.

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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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