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AMD Warns of New Meltdown, Spectre-like Bugs Affecting CPUs
by Peter Reutemann 10 Jul '25

10 Jul '25

'AMD is warning users of a newly discovered form of side-channel attack affecting a broad range of its chips that could lead to information disclosure. Register: Akin to Meltdown and Spectre, the Transient Scheduler Attack (TSA) comprises four vulnerabilities that AMD said it discovered while looking into a Microsoft report about microarchitectural leaks. The four bugs do not appear too venomous at face value -- two have medium-severity ratings while the other two are rated "low." However, the low-level nature of the exploit's impact has nonetheless led Trend Micro and CrowdStrike to assess the threat as "critical." The reasons for the low severity scores are the high degree of complexity involved in a successful attack -- AMD said it could only be carried out by an attacker able to run arbitrary code on a target machine. It affects AMD processors (desktop, mobile and datacenter models), including 3rd gen and 4th gen EPYC chips -- the full list is here.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/07/09/1835230 Cheers, Peter

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GIMP 3.2 Promises New Paint Mode, Support for Importing Photoshop Patterns
by Peter Reutemann 04 Jul '25

04 Jul '25

'GIMP 3.2 promises new features like theme colors for Brush, Font, and Palette, a new paint blend mode called Overwrite that lets you directly replace the pixels over the area you paint, a new setting in the text tool to control the direction of the text outline, and automatic match of Linux and Windows OS themes. It also promises support for using ART (AnotherRawTherapee) as a Camera Raw loader, a new option to export to Krita‘s .kpl palette format, support for importing Photoshop patterns, as well as support for using presets from Photoshop’s Curves and Levels filters in GIMP’s Curves and Levels filters. In addition, GIMP 3.2 will bring initial support for exporting Photoshop Large format (PSB) files, support for importing APNG animations, support for loading multi-layer OpenEXR images, support for importing and exporting JPEG 2000 images, and support for loading and exporting Sony Playstation 1 TIM textures and images. But wait, that’s not all because GIMP 3.2 also promises support for importing Nokia’s historical black and white Over-the-Air Bitmap format, support for importing the GIF variant known as Jeff’s Image Format (.jif), and support for importing Advanced Video Coding (AVCI) still images. Among other noteworthy changes, GIMP 3.2 promises to improve non-destructive editing, update the CMYK Color Selector to calculate and display the Total Ink Coverage of the selected color, and implement a new API to create a GimpCoordinates widget in the auto-generated dialog.' -- source: https://9to5linux.com/gimp-3-2-promises-new-paint-mode-support-for-importin… Cheers, Peter

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Let's Encrypt Rolls Out Free Security Certs For IP Addresses
by Peter Reutemann 04 Jul '25

04 Jul '25

'Let's Encrypt, a certificate authority (CA) known for its free TLS/SSL certificates, has begun issuing digital certificates for IP addresses. From a report: It's not the first CA to do so. PositiveSSL, Sectigo, and GeoTrust all offer TLS/SSL certificates for use with IP addresses, at prices ranging from $40 to $90 or so annually. But Let's Encrypt does so at no cost. For those with a static IP address who want to host a website, an IP address certificate provides a way to offer visitors a secure connection with that numeric identifier while avoiding the nominal expense of a domain name.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/07/03/1452239 Cheers, Peter

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Linux’s Remarkable Journey From One Dev's Hobby To 40 Million Lines Of Code - And Counting
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 03 Jul '25

03 Jul '25

A retrospective <https://www.zdnet.com/article/linuxs-remarkable-journey-from-one-devs-hobby…> on how the Linux kernel project got to where it is today. Quotes: “We're always building on the kernel, despite the fact that a lot of things were happening in the world over these three decades. We had the dotcom crash in 2000. We had the SCO lawsuit. In 2008, there was the global economic crisis. And of course, we had the COVID pandemic. But you don't really see an effect on the development speed of Linux from any of these events. We have somehow managed to sustain everything we can do despite all the stuff that has happened in the world.” ... Of course, for years, no one took Linux seriously. It was dismissed as a toy in an era when Unix fragmentation and the rise of Windows NT dominated industry thinking. The prevailing wisdom held that only large corporations could build operating system kernels, leaving little attention for a community-driven initiative. Yet, as Corbet noted, Linux exemplified Clayton Christensen's concept of disruptive innovation: a technology dismissed as inferior that quietly matures until it overtakes established players. Why did the BSDs lose their early lead? Another factor, Corbet explained, was that in the early 1990s, the BSD Unix systems were much more mature than Linux; they were capable of doing more and were more usable. Still, their permissive BSD license model led to a whole bunch of forks. None of them gained the critical mass in terms of either the development community or adoption to dominate Linux. Instead, the Linux kernel stayed one thing. It stayed together, in part because its GPLv2 copyright policy meant everybody retains their copyright under the same license. Some other open-source projects (including GNU) insist that contributors sign a “Contributor Licence Agreement”, turning over their copyright to some official body in charge of the project. The Linux kernel does not, and there are others that don’t.

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PNG Spec, 3rd Edition, Is Out
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 27 Jun '25

27 Jun '25

There is has been a major update to the specification for the PNG (“Portable Network Graphics”) file-format spec <https://www.programmax.net/articles/png-is-back/>, 20 years on from the previous edition. New features include support for high-dynamic-range colour gamuts, using a new metadata entry type that is much more compact than a full embedded ICC colour profile, and the official acceptance of the APNG format for animating a sequence of images within a single PNG file.

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Lyon Abandons Microsoft Office To Strengthen 'Digital Sovereignty'
by Peter Reutemann 26 Jun '25

26 Jun '25

'The City of Lyon will replace Microsoft's office suite with free office software, including OnlyOffice for office work and Linux and PostgreSQL for systems and databases. The city aims to "no longer be dependent on American software solutions and acquire true digital sovereignty," according to an official statement. ' -- source: https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/25/1757229 Great to see that the digital sovereignty movement gaining momentum, if only down-under as well... Cheers, Peter

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Mozilla Formally Discontinues Its DeepSpeech Project
by Peter Reutemann 26 Jun '25

26 Jun '25

'One of the interesting projects engaged in by Mozilla that directly wasn't related to their web browser efforts was DeepSpeech, an embedded/offline speech-to-text engine. To not much surprise given the lack of activity in recent years, last week they finally and formally discontinued the open-source project. Mozilla DeepSpeech was a promising speech-to-text engine with great performance for real-time communication even when running on Raspberry Pi SBCs and other low-power systems.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/25/1851201 It's hard to compete with other publicly available models like OpenAI's whisper, which are really, really good. Cheers, Peter

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Ubuntu To Disable Intel Graphics Security Mitigations To Boost GPU Performance By Up To 20%
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jun '25

24 Jun '25

'Disabling Intel graphics security mitigations in GPU compute stacks for OpenCL and Level Zero can yield a performance boost of up to 20%, prompting Ubuntu's Canonical and Intel to disable these mitigations in future Ubuntu packages. Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: Intel does allow building their GPU compute stack without these mitigations by using the "NEO_DISABLE_MITIGATIONS" build option and that is what Canonical is looking to set now for Ubuntu packages to avoid the significant performance impact. This work will likely all be addressed in time for Ubuntu 25.10. This NEO_DISABLE_MITIGATIONS option is just for compiling the Intel Compute Runtime stack and doesn't impact the Linux kernel security mitigations or else outside of Intel's "NEO" GPU compute stack. Both Intel and Canonical are in agreement with this move and it turns out that even Intel's GitHub binary packages for their Compute Runtime for OpenCL and Level Zero ship with the mitigations disabled due to the performance impact. This Ubuntu Launchpad bug report for the Intel Compute Runtime notes some of the key takeaways. There is also this PPA where Ubuntu developers are currently testing their Compute Runtime builds with NEO_DISABLE_MITIGATIONS enabled for disabling the mitigations.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/23/2046259 Cheers, Peter

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WebVM
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jun '25

24 Jun '25

Just came across this project on my Mastodon feed: 'WebVM is a server-less virtual environment running fully client-side in HTML5/WebAssembly. It's designed to be Linux ABI-compatible. It runs an unmodified Debian distribution including many native development toolchains. WebVM is powered by the CheerpX virtualization engine, and enables safe, sandboxed client-side execution of x86 binaries on any browser. CheerpX includes an x86-to-WebAssembly JIT compiler, a virtual block-based file system, and a Linux syscall emulator.' -- github: https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm -- mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/114735683692335386 Cheers, Peter

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How The Grateful Dead Built The Internet
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Jun '25

23 Jun '25

Here’s an interesting piece, from the BBC of all places, about the role that a hippie band that started in the 1960s went on to play in the culture of the early Internet <https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250618-how-the-grateful-dead-shaped-so…>. Not only were their stage shows technology-heavy, but they somehow managed to attract a major following among technologists of all kinds. Among the other members of that milieu was Steward Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, a resource for those looking for tools to help them live a simpler life, less dominated by faceless corporates and promoting more intimate, personal power. Quote from the introduction: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it.” Brand went on to co-found the WELL, aka the “Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link”, which started out as a BBS with users connecting via dialup lines, before becoming an Internet-connected service -- one of the earliest examples, if not *the* earliest example, of “social media”, if you will. John Perry Barlow, one of the lyricists for the Grateful Dead, got heavily involved in the WELL and then went on to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, dedicated to the preservation of free speech and other civil rights in the online world.

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