- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Bye-Bye Dialup USA
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 10 Aug '25

10 Aug '25

US-based ISP America On-Line (AOL) will finally turn off its dialup Internet service at the end of September <https://www.tomshardware.com/service-providers/network-providers/aol-will-e…>, ending 34 years of operation. AOL was the biggest ISP in the US back in dialup days, but somehow never made a successful transition to broadband service like everyone else. Another peculiarity was that, unlike ISPs everywhere else in the world who offered their dialup service via standard protocols like SLIP (early days) or PPP (the most common later), AOL always stuck to its own proprietary protocol. The company was also infamous for loosing vast numbers of its sign-up CDs on the world via magazines, free mailouts and so on, in an effort to drum up business. There were endless jokes about what to do with this deluge of unwanted AOL CDs.

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Blender 4.5 LTS Released
by Peter Reutemann 05 Aug '25

05 Aug '25

'NERDS.xyz reports: Blender 4.5 has arrived and it's a long-term support release. That means users get two full years of updates and bug fixes, making it a smart choice for anyone looking for stability in serious projects. Whether you're a solo artist or part of a studio pipeline, this version is built to last. Here's a list of key features and changes in this release: - Vulkan backend replaces OpenGL (faster, smoother UI) - Adaptive subdivision up to 14x faster with multithreading - New Geometry Nodes: Camera Info, Instance Bounds - GPU-accelerated compositor nodes with standardized inputs - New Boolean solver: Manifold (cleaner, faster mesh operations) - UV maps visible in Object Mode + improved selection behavior - Grease Pencil render pass and Geometry Nodes integration - Improved file import support: PLY, OBJ, STL, CSV, VDB - Deprecations: Collada, Big Endian, legacy .blend, Intel Mac support - Cycles OptiX now requires NVIDIA driver v535+ - New shader variants for add-on developers (POLYLINES_*, POINT_*) ~500 bug fixes across all major systems' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/07/15/1912208 Cheers, Peter

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Microsoft Is Abandoning Windows 11 SE
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 04 Aug '25

04 Aug '25

Seems like Microsoft’s attempt to fight back against Google’s Chromebooks in the education market has been a failure, and it is giving up <https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/microsoft-ending-windows-11-s…>. Put the blame on trying to squeeze the Windows quart into the pint-pot of low-cost, purpose-built educational machines: Microsoft hasn't given a formal reason as to why they are ending Windows 11 SE. Presumably, one of the biggest challenges was that despite being a version meant for classrooms, it was fundamentally based on the full version of Windows 11. This meant it struggled to run well on the low-cost devices that schools often buy, a space where Chrome OS thrives. Google’s offering continues to be a truly lightweight cloud-based operating system designed from the ground up for this purpose. Does this mean we stop including Chromebooks as part of the “desktop” market that Windows is supposedly king of?

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Old Mailing List Archive Archive
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Aug '25

01 Aug '25

With the demise of the old Waikato-Uni-based WLUG list server went its archive of list messages. Luckily, that archive was itself archived at archive.org. Here <https://web.archive.org/web/20240711100644/https://list.waikato.ac.nz/archi…> is the last snapshot I could find of the list archive before it disappeared.

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KDE Linux
by Peter Reutemann 01 Aug '25

01 Aug '25

Looks like it is finally available (initiative got announced in 2024): 'Linux has been used for decades powering the world’s supercomputers, data centers, web servers, and most smartphones. Now KDE makes it available for you too! Introducing KDE Linux, a free operating system that can turbocharge new computers and breathe new life into old ones.' -- source: https://kde.org/linux/ -- mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/114949288867476013 Cheers, Peter

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Weta Digital’s Technology Division Sold To US Firm
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Aug '25

01 Aug '25

Let me see if I understand this article <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/sir-peter-jackson-to-sell-weta-digital-…> correctly: the part of Weta Digital that used to develop the in-house 3D graphics/effects tools that they use in all those movies is being sold to US-based Unity Software. The part that is left will be called “WetaFX”, and will become a customer of Unity for the use of those tools, no longer doing its own development in-house. By the way, I’ve been looking at the Unity site <https://unity.com/>, and it looks like all their products are rentware (subscription-based).

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Debian isn't waiting for 2038 to blow up, switches to 64-bit time for everything
by Peter Reutemann 31 Jul '25

31 Jul '25

'Venerable Linux distribution Debian is side-stepping the Y2K38 bug – also known as the Unix Epochalypse – by switching to 64-bit time for everything but the oldest of supported hardware, starting with the upcoming Debian 13 "Trixie" release. "[We will] use 64-bit time_t on 32-bit architectures to avoid the 'year 2038 problem' when the existing 32-bit signed int rolls over (potentially setting time back to 1900)," the Debian maintainers say of the move and the problem it aims to fix. y2k illustration retro futuristic The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers READ MORE "This is now less than 15 years away and plenty of systems that will have problems have already been shipped. We should stop adding to the problem." Readers of a certain vintage will remember well the "Y2K problem," caused by retrospectively shortsighted attempts to save a couple of bytes by using two-digit years – meaning that "2000" is represented as "00" and assumed to be "1900." While predictions of aircraft falling from the skies and bank balances being wiped out by negative-decades of interest did not, thankfully, come true, that was purely due to the tireless behind-the-scenes work of software developers who were able to patch affected systems before celebrating the turn of the century. There's another, less well-known clock problem looming, however: the Unix Epochalypse,which affects any systems that measure time the Unix way – in seconds elapsed since January 1, 1970. Come the very precise time of 03:14:07 UTC on January 19, 2038, the number of seconds elapsed will be larger than can be represented by a signed 32-bit integer. This would be fine if the decision hadn't been made all those years ago to store the number of seconds in exactly such a format.' -- source: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/y2k38_bug_debian/ Cheers, Peter

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Malware Discovered in Arch Linux AUR Packages
by Peter Reutemann 28 Jul '25

28 Jul '25

Something for the arch users on here: 'If you are an Arch user, you know – AUR (Arch User Repository) is a double-edged sword—it’s incredibly useful but requires caution. Unfortunately, that caution was warranted yet again this week when three AUR packages were found to contain malware. The issue came to light on July 16 when a user uploaded a malicious package, librewolf-fix-bin, to the AUR. Within hours, two more packages—firefox-patch-bin and zen-browser-patched-bin—followed, all traced back to the same bad actor. Security researchers quickly identified the threat: a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) hidden in a script pulled from a GitHub repository. For those unfamiliar, a RAT is no joke—it can grant attackers full control over an infected system, enabling them to steal data, install additional malware, or spy on users. Thankfully, the Arch Linux security team responded promptly as soon as they became aware of the issue. By July 18, all three malicious packages had been removed from AUR.' -- source: https://linuxiac.com/malware-discovered-in-arch-linux-aur-packages/ Cheers, Peter

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Clear Linux Discontinued as Intel Pulls the Plug Overnight
by Peter Reutemann 28 Jul '25

28 Jul '25

'Unfortunately, there’s a bit of sad news out of the Linux world this week, with Clear Linux taking center stage. What I’m talking about is that Intel has formally ended support for Clear Linux OS, drawing a rapid close to a nearly decade-long effort to showcase aggressive, upstream-friendly performance optimizations on x86_64. In a blog post titled “All good things come to an end: Shutting down Clear Linux OS,” the announcement states that support ends immediately, with no trailing window for security updates. "After years of innovation and community collaboration, we’re ending support for Clear Linux OS. Effective immediately, Intel will no longer provide security patches, updates, or maintenance for Clear Linux OS, and the Clear Linux OS GitHub repository will be archived in read-only mode." Crucially, “effective immediately” is not rhetorical: Intel states that there will be no further security patches, updates, or maintenance, and the project’s GitHub repository is to be archived in a read-only manner. As you can guess, that abrupt cutoff leaves any production or lab systems running Clear Linux exposed going forward, so administrators now face an urgent migration. For those unfamiliar, Clear Linux (a project launched in 2015) is an open-source, rolling-release Linux distribution developed by Intel’s Open Source Technology Center, purpose-built to showcase and leverage Intel’s hardware strengths, with a focus on high performance, security, and cloud-native workloads. -- source: https://linuxiac.com/intel-shuts-down-clear-linux-os/ Cheers, Peter

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Let Sudo Insult You When You Enter Incorrect Password
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jul '25

24 Jul '25

Add some spice to your incorrect password attempts! :-) 'Sudoers is the default sudo security policy plugin in Linux; however, experienced system administrators can specify a custom security policy as well as input and output logging plugins. It is driven by the /etc/sudoers file or, alternatively by LDAP. You can define sudoers options like the insults option or several others in the file /etc/sudoers. It is set under the Defaults entries section. [...] In this article, we will explain a sudoers configuration parameter to enable an individual or system administrator to set sudo command to insult system users who enter the wrong password.' -- source: https://www.tecmint.com/sudo-insult-when-enter-wrong-password/ Cheers, Peter

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