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GNOME 44 Released
by Peter Reutemann 23 Mar '23

23 Mar '23

'"9to5Linux.com reports that the GNOME 44 desktop environment is officially released and gives a detailed look at the major new features and improvements," writes Slashdot reader prisoninmate. From the report: Code-named "Kuala Lumpur" in recognition of the work done by the organizers of GNOME.Asia Summit 2022 conference, GNOME 44 introduces a GTK4 port of the Epihaphy (GNOME Web) web browser, a file chooser grid view for apps that use the standard GTK file chooser, as well as support for adding a WireGuard VPN directly from the Network panel. GNOME 44 continues to improve the Quick Settings feature introduced in GNOME 43 by implementing a submenu to the Bluetooth button to more easily and quickly connect or disconnect peripherals, adding descriptions to buttons to easily see their status, and implementing a new feature called Background Apps via a new background monitoring service in XDG portals 1.16.0." A full list of changes are available in the official release notes. The GNOME project also published a launch video on YouTube.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/03/22/2211217 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Mozilla Launches a New Startup Focused on 'Trustworthy' AI
by Peter Reutemann 23 Mar '23

23 Mar '23

'On the eve of its 25th anniversary, Mozilla, the not-for-profit behind the Firefox browser, is launching an AI-focused startup. From a report: Called Mozilla.ai, the newly forged company's mission isn't to build just any AI -- its mission is to build AI that's open source and "trustworthy," according to Mark Surman, the executive president of Mozilla and the head of Mozilla.ai. "Working on trustworthy AI for almost five years, I've constantly felt a mix of excitement and anxiety," he told TechCrunch in an email interview. "The last month or two of rapid-fire big tech AI announcements has been no different. Really exciting new tech is emerging -- new tools that have immediately sparked artists, founders ... all kinds of people to do new things. The anxiety comes when you realize almost no one is looking at the guardrails." Surman was referring to the rash of AI models in recent months that, while impressive in their capabilities, have worrisome real-world implications. At release, OpenAI's text-generating ChatGPT could be prompted to write malware, identify exploits in open source code and create phishing websites that looked similar to well-trafficked sites. Text-to-image AI like Stable Diffusion, meanwhile, has been co-opted to create pornographic, nonconsensual deepfakes and ultra-graphic depictions of violence. The creators of these models say that they're taking steps to curb abuse. But Mozilla felt that not enough was being done. "We've been working on trustworthy AI on the public interest research side for about five years, hoping other industry players with more AI expertise would step up to build more trustworthy tech," Surman said. "They haven't. So we decided mid-last year we needed to do it ourselves -- and to find like-minded partners to do it alongside us. We then set out to find someone with the right mix of academic and industry AI experience to lead it." Funded by a $30 million seed investment from the Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla's parent organization, Mozilla.ai is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation -- much like the Mozilla Corporation (the org responsible for developing Firefox) and Mozilla Ventures (the Mozilla Foundation's VC fund). Its managing director is Moez Draief, who previously was the chief scientist at Huawei's Noah's Ark AI lab and the global chief scientist at consulting company Capgemini.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/03/22/1510255 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Russian Developers Blocked From Contributing To FOSS Tools
by Peter Reutemann 22 Mar '23

22 Mar '23

'The Reg has seen two recent incidents of Russian developers being blocked from public development of FOSS code. One was a refusal on the Linux kernel mailing list, the other a more general block on Github. In the last week, these events have both caused active, and sometimes heated, discussions in FOSS developer communities. From the report: The GitHub account of developer Alexander Amelkin has been blocked, and his repositories marked as "archived" â" including ipmitool, whose README describes it as "a utility for managing and configuring devices that support the Intelligent Platform Management Interface." Unable to comment on Github itself, Amelkin described what happened on the project's older Soureforge page. Amelkin works for Russian chipbuilder Yadro, which we described as working on RISC-V chips back in 2021. Microsoft is just obeying US law in this: according to the War and Sanctions database of the Ukrainian National Agency on Corruption Prevention, the NACP, Yadro is a sanctioned company. However, on LinkedIn, Amelkin disputes his employer's involvement. Over on Hacker News, commentators seem to be generally in favor of the move, although the discussion on LWN is more measured, pointing out both that there is little threat from server-management tools like this, but that Microsoft probably has no choice. Amelkin is not alone. Over on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, a contribution from Sergey Semin has been refused with the terse notice: "We don't feel comfortable accepting patches from or relating to hardware produced by your organization. Please withhold networking contributions until further notice." Semin is a developer at chipmaker Baikal Electronics, a company whose website has been suspended for a year now, as we noted a year ago in a story that also mentions Yadro. We were reporting on Baikal's efforts to develop its own CPUs nearly a decade ago, mere months after the Russian annexation of Crimea. And once again, there is spirited debate over the move on the Orange Site. ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/03/21/2126227 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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ASUS Unveils the Tinker V As Their First RISC-V Board
by Peter Reutemann 21 Mar '23

21 Mar '23

'Phoronix: For over a half-decade ASUS has been selling the Tinker Board devices as their line of Raspberry Pi alternatives. To date the ASUS Tinker Board single board computers have all been Arm-based while now they have launched their first RISC-V board, the Tinker V. The ASUS Tinker V is their first RISC-V single board computer and intended for the industrial IoT (Internet of Things) developer community. The ASUS Tinker V is set to officially run Debian Linux and Yocto while surely with time more Linux distributions will be supported.... Being IoT focused, there isn't any display support. Those interested in learning more about the ASUS Tinker V can do so via tinker-board.asus.com. The Register notes that Asus "is offering at least five years of support for Tinker V... Dedicated on-site technical support is also available to shorten customer development cycles and accelerate application deployment." The move shows that the RISC-V open-source instruction set architecture continues to garner support. The last RISC-V Summit in San Jose saw the launch of a family of datacenter-class processors based on the architecture from Ventana Micro Systems, while XMOS unveiled new high-performance microcontrollers using RISC-V. According to Asus, Tinker V samples will be available in Q2 of this year, but it did not disclose a date for full availability or pricing.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/03/20/0034207 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Question please re: How to attach an Android (Samsung cellphone Galaxy A03S) photo to a Gmail email using Firefox and Ubuntu
by Michael James 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

G'day... Can anyone please suggest how to attach a photo - (from a Samsung Galaxy A03S cellphone via USB cable from the phone to a desktop) - onto a Gmail email using Firefox and running Ubuntu. Have tried connecting the phone via USB to the desktop and clicking the attach button on the email and double clicking the file in the Ubuntu Files folder under the Activities heading. This does not work. I tried both right and left mouse options and the 'OPEN' option; I also tried copying the file (photo) to downloads and attempted to attach via the same above pathway but this did not work either. I came across this post (below) on the internet from 2010 with the same question and the following answer: https://superuser.com/questions/132783/how-to-email-photo-from-ubuntu-f-spo… I'm not familiar with Python code and wonder if this answer is now outdated? Wondering if the problem is with Firefox? Gmail is running fine on Ubuntu with Firefox, it's just the attaching of photos from the Android that's giving trouble. Short of using the phone itself or Thunderbird or any other email service to send the photo, is there a way to attach photos to Gmail emails via Firefox running on Ubuntu please? Thanks, Michael James __________________________________________________________________________________________

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Google tells users of some Android phones: Nuke voice calling to avoid infection
by Peter Reutemann 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

'Google is urging owners of certain Android phones to take urgent action to protect themselves from critical vulnerabilities that give skilled hackers the ability to surreptitiously compromise their devices by making a specially crafted call to their number. It’s not clear if all actions urged are even possible, however, and even if they are, the measures will neuter devices of most voice-calling capabilities. The vulnerability affects Android devices that use the Exynos Modem 5123, Exynos Modem 5300, Exynos 980, Exynos 1080, Exynos Auto T5123 chipsets made by Samsung’s semiconductor division. Vulnerable devices include the Pixel 6 and 7, international versions of the Samsung Galaxy S22, various mid-range Samsung phones, the Galaxy Watch 4 and 5, and cars with the Exynos Auto T5123 chip. These devices are ONLY vulnerable if they run the Exynos chipset, which includes the baseband that processes signals for voice calls. The US version of the Galaxy S22 runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. A bug tracked as CVE-2023-24033 and three others that have yet to receive a CVE designation make it possible for hackers to execute malicious code, Google’s Project Zero vulnerability team reported on Thursday. Code-execution bugs in the baseband can be especially critical because the chips are endowed with root-level system privileges to ensure voice calls work reliably.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/critical-vulnerabili… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Unix Pioneer Ken Thompson Announces He's Switching From Mac To Linux
by Peter Reutemann 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

'The closing keynote at the SCaLE 20x conference was delivered by 80-year-old Ken Thompson (co-creator of Unix, Plan9, UTF8, and the Go programming language). Slashdot reader motang shared Thompson answer to a question at the end about what operating system he uses today: I have, for most of my life — because I was sort of born into it — run Apple. Now recently, meaning within the last five years, I've become more and more depressed, and what Apple is doing to something that should allow you to work is just atrocious. But they are taking a lot of space and time to do it, so it's okay. And I have come, within the last month or two, to say, even though I've invested, you know, a zillion years in Apple — I'm throwing it away. And I'm going to Linux. To Raspbian in particular. ' -- source: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/23/03/18/237211 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Linux 6.4 AMD Graphics Driver Picking Up New Power Features For The Steam Deck
by Peter Reutemann 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

'Phoronix: A pull request of early AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes was submitted for DRM-Next on Friday as some of the early feature work accumulating for the Linux 6.4 kernel cycle. Among the AMDGPU kernel driver changes this round are a number of fixes affecting items such as the UMC RAS, DCN 3.2, FreeSync, SR-IOV, various IP blocks, USB4, and more. On the feature side, mentioned subtly in the change-log are a few power-related additions... These additions are largely focused on Van Gogh APUs, which is notably for the Valve Steam Deck and benefiting its graphics moving forward. First up, this kernel pull request introduces a new sysfs interface for adjusting/setting thermal throttling. This is wired up for Van Gogh and allows reading/updating the thermal limit temperature in millidegrees Celsius. This "APU thermal cap" interface is just wired up for Van Gogh and seems to be Steam Deck driven feature work so that SteamOS will be better able to manage the thermal handling of the APU graphics.... These power features will be exposed via sysfs while Steam OS will wrap around them intelligently and possibly some new UI settings knobs for those wanting more control over their Steam Deck's thermal/performance. ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/03/19/2040247 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Most Failed Drives Fail Before 3 Years Of Use
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Mar '23

19 Mar '23

In contrast to backup company Backblaze, here is a report <https://blocksandfiles.com/2023/03/16/failed-disk-drives-fail-after-just-un…> from one of the ambulances at the bottom of the cliff -- a company that tries to recover data from drives after they have failed. What they find is the average working life of a failed drive is just under three years of total power-on time. (So if a drive doesn’t fail by then, it looks like its chances of surviving longer are increased.) Also worth noting that, when a drive goes bad, it doesn’t go just a little bad (say, one or two bad sectors), it tends to go significantly bad (hundreds or thousands of bad sectors). This has been my experience with bad drives too (at least, those that could still spin up and do some I/O transfers successfully). Interesting quotes: “We found that the five most durable and resilient hard drives from [the two most popular manufacturers, Western Digital and Seagate] were made before 2015. On the other hand, most of the least durable and resilient hard drives from each manufacturer were made after 2015.” and “in general, old drives seem more durable and resilient than new drives,” and “disks with CMR (conventional magnetic recording) appear more durable and resilient than those with SMR.” I think SMR drives are only used for archive purposes, because the process for writing new data onto them is somewhat convoluted and slow. Ironic, though, that an archive drive might not be that reliable ...

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All-Open Source 7-Inch MNT Reform Pocket Laptop Ships In October
by Peter Reutemann 16 Mar '23

16 Mar '23

'An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The creators of the all-open source MNT Reform laptop are getting nearer to launching its handheld counterpart: The crowdfunding campaign for the 7-inch MNT Pocket Reform has officially launched and is also serving as a de-facto preorder system for the device. The cheapest version of the Pocket Reform starts at $899, and it's also being offered in purple for $969 or in a bundle with a 1TB SSD, carrying case, handbook, and poster for $1,299. All versions are currently slated to ship in mid-October. Like the full-size Reform, the pocket version uses open source hardware and a mechanical keyboard (buyers can choose either white or red Kalih switches). But the pocket version uses a 7-inch 1920x1200 LCD screen instead of a 12.5-inch version and comes with fewer and smaller ports (two USB-C, one micro HDMI, a microSD port, and one ix industrial mini Ethernet port). Its keyboard also comes with an individually programmable RGB backlight, and its trackball-style pointing device has been downsized to fit into the smaller design. The Pocket Reform also includes built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, 128GB of built-in eMMC storage, and an expansion slot for 4G cellular connectivity. The device will also boot from microSD cards or an NVMe SSD installed in the device's M.2 slot. Its 8000 mAh batteries will allow it to run for about four hours. MNT warns in its blog post that "risks and challenges" could delay the October shipping timeline: "Pocket Reform has hundreds of electronic components. We tried to pick them so that there will be enough stock when we get around to manufacturing the boards, but it's always possible that there could be a sudden component shortage or increase in price. If that should happen, we would have to re-engineer the affected PCB and exchange the part, causing a delay in continued production. We had to adapt our products several times during the global chip crisis, so we are confident that we'll be able to work around any difficulties. Should any situation arise that would delay the estimated shipping timeline, backers will be informed promptly via project updates."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/03/15/2043243 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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DreamWorks' OpenMoonRay Renderer Code Published
by Peter Reutemann 16 Mar '23

16 Mar '23

'Today, DreamWorks published the open-source code for MoonRay, their production renderer used for films like The Bad Guys, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and other animation films. "OpenMoonRay is available via DreamWorks Animation's GitHub," reports Phoronix. "This professional-grade renderer is available under an Apache 2.0 license." >From the README: "MoonRay was developed at DreamWorks and is in continuous active development and includes an extensive library of production-tested, physically based materials, a USD Hydra render delegate, multi-machine and cloud rendering via the Arras distributed computation framework." More details can be found via OpenMoonRay.org.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/03/15/225218 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Microsoft’s File-Tainting System ’Tain’t Working
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Mar '23

15 Mar '23

Microsoft has a clever-sounding system for trying to protect Windows users from downloading malicious files: it’s called “Mark-Of-The-Web”. What it means is that any file downloaded from an untrusted source is supposed to have a special flag set in its NTFS metadata indicating that the file is not to be trusted. So any attempt by the user to perform sensitive operations on that file (e.g. execute macros from it, run it as an executable) is supposed to trigger appropriate system warnings. If the file is a .zip archive, then this mark is supposed to be propagated to all files extracted from that archive. However, it turns out this mechanism can be bypassed (surprise, surprise) <https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/01/microsoft_motw_malware_flaw/>. How can this happen? The flaw lies in the mechanism used to tell Windows to trust downloaded files, by attaching an “Authenticode” signature to them. Files without such signatures are of course untrusted and will trigger the appropriate warnings. However, by attaching an invalid signature of a particular form, you can trigger an error response from the signature-checking process that is actually interpreted as “this file is OK” <https://blog.0patch.com/2022/10/free-micropatches-for-bypassing-motw.html>. What do you call it when an attempt to add mechanisms to make a system more secure actually increases the attack surface on that system? By the way, the referenced Twitter thread discussing this vulnerability <https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1579895038523609088> seems to be saying that no Mark-Of-The-Web propagation is done for files extracted from .iso disc images. And that Microsoft uses this form for distributing its own software (Visio was mentioned) precisely to avoid the hassle of going through vetting by third-party antimalware tools.

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cURL, the omnipresent data tool, is getting a 25th birthday party this month
by Peter Reutemann 13 Mar '23

13 Mar '23

'When you first start messing with the command line, it can feel like there's an impermeable wall between the local space you're messing around in and the greater Internet. On your side, you've got your commands and files, and beyond the wall, there are servers, images, APIs, webpages, and more bits of useful, ever-changing data. One of the most popular ways through that wall has been cURL, or "client URL," which turns 25 this month. The cURL tool started as a way for programmer Daniel Stenberg to let Internet Chat Relay users quickly fetch currency exchange rates while still inside their chat window. As detailed in an archived history of the project, it was originally built off an existing command-line tool, httpget, built by Rafael Sagula. A 1.0 version was released in 1997, then changed names to urlget by 2.0, as it had added in GOPHER, FTP, and other protocols. By 1998, the tool could upload as well as download, and so version 4.0 was named cURL. Over the next few years, cURL grew to encompass nearly every Internet protocol, work with certificates and encryption, offer bindings for more than 50 languages, and be included in most Linux distributions and other systems. The cURL project now encompasses both the command-line command itself and the libcurl library. In 2020, the project's history estimated the command and library had been installed in more than 10 billion instances worldwide.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/curl-the-omnipresent… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Backblaze: SSDs Only Slightly More Reliable Than Hard Drives
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Mar '23

11 Mar '23

The latest storage reliability report from backup company Backblaze is out <https://blocksandfiles.com/2023/03/10/backblaze-ssd-vs-hdd/>, and they are starting to include data from their increasing use of SSDs. One result: SSDs are not much more reliable than hard drives. They find an annualized failure rate of 1.64% for HDDs, 0.98% for the solid-state ones. You could say that’s over 50% greater reliability, but it’s not enough to make any material difference to the need for a proper backup regime. Another interesting result is that SMART diagnostics from SSD controllers seem to be very inconsistent. That is to say, they are even less useful than the ones from hard drives. Not that I would bother with either.

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Malware infecting widely used security appliance survives firmware updates
by Peter Reutemann 10 Mar '23

10 Mar '23

'Threat actors with a connection to the Chinese government are infecting a widely used security appliance from SonicWall with malware that remains active even after the device receives firmware updates, researchers said. SonicWall’s Secure Mobile Access 100 is a secure remote access appliance that helps organizations securely deploy remote workforces. Customers use it to grant granular access controls to remote users, provide VPN connections to organization networks, and set unique profiles for each employee. The access the SMA 100 has to customer networks makes it an attractive target for threat actors. In 2021, the device came under attack by sophisticated hackers who exploited what was then a zero-day vulnerability. Security appliances from Fortinet and Pulse Secure have come under similar attacks in recent years.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/malware-infecting-wi… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Raspberry Pi Lets You Have Your Own Global Shutter Camera For $50
by Peter Reutemann 10 Mar '23

10 Mar '23

'Global shutter sensors with no skew or distortion have been promised as the future of cameras for years now, but so far only a handful of products with that tech have made it to market. Now, Raspberry Pi is offering a 1.6-megapixel global shutter camera module to hobbyists for $50, providing a platform for machine vision, hobbyist shooting and more. From a report: The Raspberry Pi Global Shutter Camera uses a 6.3mm Sony IMX296 sensor, and requires a Raspberry Pi board with a CSI camera connector. Like other global shutter sensors, it works by pairing each pixel with an analog storage element, so that light signals can be captured and stored by all pixels simultaneously. By comparison, regular CMOS sensors read and store the light captured by pixels from top to bottom and left to right. That can cause diagonal skew on fast moving subjects, or very weird distortion on rotating objects like propellers.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/03/09/1241216 If only you could get hands on the Raspberry Pis themselves... ;-) Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Linux Mint Mate - number of workspaces read-only
by Peter Reutemann 08 Mar '23

08 Mar '23

Hi everyone I've been baffled with my Linux Mint Mate 20.2 for a while now that I couldn't change the number of workspaces, as it was greyed in the preferences of the workspace switcher (fixed to 4). Used to work in the past (and maybe again with newer versions). Finally came across a command-line that can change the number of workspaces, bypassing the preferences dialog: gsettings set org.mate.Marco.general num-workspaces 4 Source: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=298336 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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The SCO Lawsuit: Looking Back 20 Years Later
by Peter Reutemann 07 Mar '23

07 Mar '23

'"On March 7, 2003, a struggling company called The SCO Group filed a lawsuit against IBM," writes LWN.net, "claiming that the success of Linux was the result of a theft of SCO's technology..." Two decades later, "It is hard to overestimate how much the community we find ourselves in now was shaped by a ridiculous lawsuit 20 years ago...." It was the claim of access to Unix code that was the most threatening allegation for the Linux community. SCO made it clear that, in its opinion, Linux was stolen property: "It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach UNIX performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of UNIX code, methods or concepts". To rectify this "misappropriation", SCO was asking for a judgment of at least $1 billion, later increased to $5 billion. As the suit dragged on, SCO also started suing Linux users as it tried to collect a tax for use of the system. Though this has never been proven, it was widely assumed at the time that SCO's real objective was to prod IBM into acquiring the company. That would have solved SCO's ongoing business problems and IBM, for rather less than the amount demanded in court, could have made an annoying problem go away and also lay claim to the ownership of Unix — and, thus, Linux. To SCO's management, it may well have seemed like a good idea at the time. IBM, though, refused to play that game; the company had invested heavily into Linux in its early days and was uninterested in allowing any sort of intellectual-property taint to attach to that effort. So the company, instead, directed its not inconsiderable legal resources to squashing this attack. But notably, so did the development community as a whole, as did much of the rest of the technology industry. Over the course of the following years — far too many years — SCO's case fell to pieces. The "misappropriated" technology wasn't there. Due to what must be one of the worst-written contracts in technology-industry history, it turned out that SCO didn't even own the Unix copyrights it was suing over. The level of buffoonery was high from the beginning and got worse; the company lost at every turn and eventually collapsed into bankruptcy.... Microsoft, which had not yet learned to love Linux, funded SCO and loudly bought licenses from the company. Magazines like Forbes were warning the "Linux-loving crunchies in the open-source movement" that they "should wake up". SCO was suggesting a license fee of $1,399 — per-CPU — to run Linux.... Such an effort, in less incompetent hands, could easily have damaged Linux badly. As it went, SCO, despite its best efforts, instead succeeded in improving the position of Linux — in development, legal, and economic terms — considerably. The article argues SCO's lawsuit ultimately proved that Linux didn't contain copyrighted code "in a far more convincing way than anybody else could have." (And the provenance of all Linux code contributions are now carefully documented.) The case also proved the need for lawyers to vigorously defend the rights of open source programmers. And most of all, it revealed the Linux community was widespread and committed. And "Twenty years later, it is fair to say that Linux is doing a little better than The SCO Group. Its swaggering leader, who thought to make his fortune by taxing Linux, filed for personal bankruptcy in 2020."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/03/04/0359236 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Will AMD's 'openSIL' Library Enable Open-Source Silicon Initialization With Coreboot?
by Peter Reutemann 07 Mar '23

07 Mar '23

'Formerly known as LinuxBIOS, coreboot is defined by Wikipedia as "a software project aimed at replacing proprietary firmware (BIOS or UEFI) found in most computers with a lightweight firmware." Phoronix is wondering if there's about to be a big announcement from AMD: AMD dropped a juicy tid-bit of information to be announced next month with "openSIL" [an open-source AMD x86 silicon initialization library], complete with AMD Coreboot support.... While about a decade ago AMD was big into Coreboot and at the time committed to it for future hardware platforms (2011: AMD To Support Coreboot On All Future CPUs) [and] open-source AGESA at the time did a lot of enabling around it, that work had died off. In more recent years, AMD's Coreboot contributions have largely been limited to select consumer APU/SoC platforms for Google Chromebook use. But issues around closing up the AGESA as well as concerns with the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP) have diminished open-source firmware hopes in recent years.... For the Open Compute Project Regional Summit in Prague, there is a new entry added with a title of OSF on AMD — Enabled by openSIL (yes, folks, OSF as in "Open-Source Firmware").... [H]opefully this will prove to be a monumental shift for open-source firmware in the HPC server space. >From the talk's description: openSIL (AMD open-source x86 Silicon Initialization Library) offers the versatility, scalability, and light weight interface to allow for ease of integration with open-source and/or proprietary host boot solutions such as coreboot, UEFI and others and adds major flexibility to the overall platform design. In other words, this library-based solution simply allows a platform integrator to scale from feature rich solutions such as UEFI to slim, lightweight, and secure solutions such as coreboot. The description promises the talk will include demonstrations "highlighting system bring-up using openSIL integrated with coreboot and UEFI Host Firmware stacks on AMD's Genoa based platforms."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/03/06/0253208 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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AGM minutes
by Peter Reutemann 01 Mar '23

01 Mar '23

Hi everyone The second attempt at running our AGM took place successfully on Monday night and the minutes are now available: http://wiki.wlug.org.nz/MeetingTopics.2023-02-27 Due to no one stepping forward to take up the president's office, we've decided to wind up the society. Thanks everyone for supporting WLUG over the years. We will keep this mailing list open as a place for exchanging news and knowledge around Linux and open source software. Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Quote Of The Week
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 28 Feb '23

28 Feb '23

>From a reader comment to an article <https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/27/microsoft_ai_gpt3_data/> wherein Microsoft suggests that, since these machine-learning models are so good at generating fake and even nonsensical responses, why not use them to deliberately generate fictional sample data for testing purposes: For decades, we've written hundreds of sci-fi stories where you have an evil out-of-control AI, and that AI is hyperintelligent but can only reason along strict logical lines, and is ultimately defeated by exploiting its lack of imagination. And then, suddenly, it turns out that the AIs we can actually make have way too much imagination, and are utterly incapable of logical thought. I find this hilarious.

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Who Writes Linux and Open Source Software?
by Peter Reutemann 28 Feb '23

28 Feb '23

'From an opinion piece in the Register: Aiven, an open source cloud data platform company, recently analyzed who's doing what with GitHub open source code projects. They found that the top open source contributors were all companies — Amazon Web Services, Intel, Red Hat, Google, and Microsoft.... Aiven looked at three metrics within the GitHub archives. These were the number of contributors, repositories (projects) contributed to, and the number of commits made by the contributors. These were calculated using Google Big Query analysis of PushEvents on public GitHub data. The company found that Microsoft and Google were neck-and-neck for the top spot. Red Hat is in third place, followed by Intel, then AWS, just ahead of IBM.... Red Hat is following closely behind and is currently contributing more commits than Google, with 125,012 in Q4 2022 compared to Google's 94,961. Microsoft is ahead of both, with 128,247 commits. However, regarding contributed staff working on projects, Google is leading the way with 5,757 compared to Microsoft's 5,513 and Red Hat's 3,656.... Heikki Nousiainen, Aiven CTO and co-founder, commented: "An unexpected result of our research was seeing Amazon overtake IBM to become the fifth biggest contributor." They "came late to the open source party, but they're now doubling down on its open source commitments and realizing the benefits that come with contributing to the open source projects its customers use." So, yes, open source certainly started with individual contributors, but today, and for many years before, it's company employees that are really making the code.... Aiven is far from the only one to have noticed that companies are now open source's economic engine. Jonathan Corbet, editor-in-chief of Linux Weekly News (LWN), found in his most recent analysis of Long Term Support Linux Kernel releases from 5.16 to 6.1 that a mere 7.5 percent of the kernel development, as measured by lines changed, came from individual developers. No, the real leaders were, in order: AMD; Intel; Google; Linaro, the main Arm Linux development organization; Meta; and Red Hat. The article also includes this thought-provoking quote from Aiven CTO's. "Innovation is at the heart of the open source community, but without a strong commitment from companies, the whole system will struggle. "We can see that companies are recognizing their role and supporting all who use open source."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/02/26/1950212 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Emacs: Comparing Two Regions From Two Files
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 28 Feb '23

28 Feb '23

So I was compiling some useful database-related routines that I have used in various places (with MySQL and SQLite so far) over the years into a set of common modules, so that I could easily find the latest and best-tested versions of them for future projects. Then I came to a routine with two versions of a few dozen lines each, and I was trying to figure out a way of doing a diff on them without writing them out to temporary files. I have an Emacs command called “make-command-buffer”, which I can use for example to create a buffer for entering and executing shell commands, and collecting their output. It was easy enough to copy and paste both routines into the buffer, but now how do I put them both into one diff command? There is a shell feature called “here-docs”, which lets you include the standard-input data for a command directly following the command: «cmd» <<«marker» ... data ... «marker» where the «marker» is some word that does not occur in the data. But I want to have two of these, like this: diff -u <<EOD1 <<EOD2 ... version 1 ... EOD1 ... version 2 ... EOD2 You can do something like that in Perl, but it doesn’t work in the shell. Hunting around on line reminded me why: because you can only have one standard input. But in the Bash man page, there is a syntax for redirecting arbitary file descriptors, letting you have any number of heredocs. So, combining this with the ability to give a command a file name that corresponds to an already-open file descriptor, I finally got this to work: diff -u /dev/fd/8 /dev/fd/9 8<<EOD1 9<<EOD2 ... version 1 ... EOD1 ... version 2 ... EOD2

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LastPass says employee’s home computer was hacked and corporate vault taken
by Peter Reutemann 28 Feb '23

28 Feb '23

'Already smarting from a breach that put partially encrypted login data into a threat actor’s hands, LastPass on Monday said that the same attacker hacked an employee’s home computer and obtained an unencrypted vault available to only a handful of company developers. Although an initial intrusion into LastPass ended on August 12, officials with the leading password manager said the threat actor “was actively engaged in a new series of reconnaissance, enumeration, and exfiltration activity” from August 12 to August 26. In the process, the unknown threat actor was able to steal valid credentials from a senior DevOps engineer and access the contents of a LastPass data vault. Among other things, the vault gave access to a shared cloud-storage environment that contained the encryption keys for customer vault backups stored in Amazon S3 buckets.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/lastpass-hackers-inf… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Asahi Linux Disputes Report That Linux 6.2 Will Run on Apple M1 Chips
by Peter Reutemann 28 Feb '23

28 Feb '23

'Last week ZDNet reported Linux had added upstream support for the Apple M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra chips and then concluded that "newer Mac owners can look forward to running Linux on their M1-powered machines." Saturday Asahi Linux called ZDNet's story "misleading and borderline false," posting on Twitter that "You will not be able to run Ubuntu nor any other standard distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please don't get your hopes up." We are continuously upstreaming kernel features, and 6.2 notably adds device trees and basic boot support for M1 Pro/Max/Ultra machines. However, there is still a long road before upstream kernels are usable on laptops. There is no trackpad/keyboard support upstream yet. While you can boot an upstream 6.2 kernel on desktops (M1 Mac Mini, M1 Max/Ultra Mac Studio) and do useful things with it, that is only the case for 16K page size kernel builds. No generic ARM64 distro ships 16K kernels today, to our knowledge. Our goal is to upstream everything, but that doesn't mean distros instantly get Apple Silicon support. As with many other platforms, there is some integration work required. Distros need to package our userspace tooling and, at this time, offer 16K kernels. In the future, once 4K kernel builds are somewhat usable, you can expect zero-integration distros to somewhat work on these machines (i.e. some hardware will work, but not all, or only partially). This should be sufficient to add a third-party repo with the integration packages. But for out-of-the-box hardware support, distros will need to work with us to get everything right. We are already working with some, and we expect to announce official Apple Silicon support for a mainstream distro in the near future. Just not quite yet!' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/02/27/0457206 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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