I’m surprised to be learning this, but I’ve never tried to use a non-Apple HiDPI display with my Macs. Weird that it works so well on the HiDPI built-in displays and their external displays, but won’t bother to make it work right with non-Apple displays.
(taps head) Can’t infect a system that won’t turn on.
Instances don’t actually own the copyright to comments. The poster owns the copyright and licenses it to the instance. Which lets the instance use it, but not sublicense to others.
I think that it’s foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further, it defeats the point of a federation.
It defeats some of the points of federation, but there are still a lot of reasons why federation is still worth doing even if there’s essentially one dominant provider. Not least of which is that sometimes the dominant provider does get displaced over time. We’ve seen it happen with email a few times, where the dominant provider loses market share to upstarts, one of whom becomes the new dominant provider in some specific use case (enterprise vs consumer, mobile vs desktop vs automation/scripting, differences by nation or language), and where the federation between those still allows the systems to communicate with each other.
Applied to Lemmy/kbin/mbin and other forum-like social link aggregators, I could see LW being dominant in the English-speaking, American side of things, but with robust options outside of English language or communities physically located outside of North America. And we’ll all still be able to interact.
For my personal devices:
I’ve worked with work systems that used RedHat and Ubuntu back in the late 2000’s, plus decades of work computers with Windows. But I’m no longer in a technical career field so I haven’t kept on top of the latest and greatest.
When they say modules, does that mean mainboards?
They mean each part. Here’s their store for individual parts.
This announcement includes a new display, so anyone with the old display can swap out their old one for the new one. People can swap out batteries. Keyboards. Touchpads. It’s a modular design so that each module can be swapped out if broken, or if there’s been an upgrade the user wants.
Our data centers and backbone internet/Tier 1 internet providers are basically the best in the world. The US Department of Energy maintains a network with 46 Tbit/s connections between its labs.
Those small USB drives are too slow anyway, often limited to USB 2.0 interfaces or slow flash modules. I’ve switched over to an SSD specifically because of how slow booting and installation is from a standard 10-year-old USB stick.
every distro I’ve tried has a strong sense that if you’re using the GUI you don’t need or deserve admin controls
It’s more that GUI programs can’t be trusted with root privileges. They’re not designed for that, and can break things in unpredictable ways.
I don’t think the First Amendment would ever require the government to host private speech. The rule is basically that if you host private speech, you can’t discriminate by viewpoint (and you’re limited in your ability to discriminate by content). Even so, you can always regulate time, place, and manner in a content-neutral way.
The easiest way to do it is to simply do one of the suggestions of the linked article, and only permit government users and government servers to federate inbound, so that the government hosted servers never have to host anything private, while still fulfilling the general purpose of publishing public government communications, for everyone else to host and republish on their own servers if they so choose.
None of what I’m saying is unique to the mechanics of open source. It’s just that the open source ecosystem as it currently exists today has different attack surfaces than a closed source ecosystem.
Governance models for a project are a very reasonable thing to consider when deciding whether to use a dependency for your application or library.
At a certain point, though, that’s outsourced to trust whoever someone else trusts. When I trust a specific distro (because I’m certainly not rolling my own distro), I’m trusting how they maintain their repos, as well as which packages they include by default. Then, each of those packages has dependencies, which in turn have dependencies. The nature of this kind of trust is that we select people one or two levels deep, and assume that they have vetted the dependencies another one or two levels, all the way down. XZ did something malicious with systemd, which opened a vulnerability in sshd, as compiled for certain distros.
You’re assuming that 100% of the source code used in a closed source project was developed by that company and according to the company’s governance model, which you assume is a good one.
Not at all. I’m very aware that some prior hacks by very sophisticated, probably state sponsored attackers have abused the chain of trust in proprietary software dependencies. Stuxnet relied on stolen private keys trusted by Windows for signing hardware drivers. The Solarwinds hack relied on compromising plugins trusted by Microsoft 365.
But my broader point is that there are simply more independent actors in the open source ecosystem. If a vulnerability takes the form of the weakest link, where compromising any one of the many independent links is enough to gain access, that broadly distributed ecosystem is more vulnerable. If a vulnerability requires chaining different things together so that multiple parts of the ecosystem are compromised, then distributing decisionmaking makes the ecosystem more robust. That’s the tradeoff I’m describing, and making things spread too thin introduces the type of vulnerability that I’m describing.
In the broader context of that thread, I’m inclined to agree with you: The circumstances by which this particular vulnerability was discovered shows that it took a decent amount of luck to catch it, and one can easily imagine a set of circumstances where this vulnerability would’ve slipped by the formal review processes that are applied to updates in these types of packages. And while it would be nice if the billion-dollar-companies that rely on certain packages would provide financial support for the open source projects they use, the question remains on how we should handle it when those corporations don’t. Do we front it ourselves, or just live with the knowledge that our security posture isn’t optimized for safety, because nobody will pay for that improvement?
100%.
In many ways, distributed open source software gives more social attack surfaces, because the system itself is designed to be distributed where a lot of people each handle a different responsibility. Almost every open source license includes an explicit disclaimer of a warranty, with some language that says something like this:
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
Well, bring together enough dependencies, and you’ll see that certain widely distributed software packages depend on the trust of dozens, if not hundreds, of independent maintainers.
This particular xz vulnerability seems to have affected systemd and sshd, using what was a socially engineered attack on a weak point in the entire dependency chain. And this particular type of social engineering (maintainer burnout, looking for a volunteer to take over) seems to fit more directly into open source culture than closed source/corporate development culture.
In the closed source world, there might be fewer places to probe for a weak link (socially or technically), which makes certain types of attacks more difficult. In other words, it might truly be the case that closed source software is less vulnerable to certain types of attacks, even if detection/audit/mitigation of those types of attacks is harder for closed source.
It’s a tradeoff, not a free lunch. I still generally trust open source stuff more, but let’s not pretend it’s literally better in every way.
Good writeup.
The use of ephemeral third party accounts to “vouch” for the maintainer seems like one of those things that isn’t easy to catch in the moment (when an account is new, it’s hard to distinguish between a new account that will be used going forward versus an alt account created for just one purpose), but leaves a paper trail for an audit at any given time.
I would think that Western state sponsored hackers would be a little more careful about leaving that trail of crumbs that becomes obvious in an after-the-fact investigation. So that would seem to weigh against Western governments being behind this.
Also, the last bit about all three names seeming like three different systems of Romanization of three different dialects of Chinese is curious. If it is a mistake (and I don’t know enough about Chinese to know whether having three different dialects in the same name is completely implausible), that would seem to suggest that the sponsors behind the attack aren’t that familiar with Chinese names (which weighs against the Chinese government being behind it).
Interesting stuff, lots of unanswered questions still.
Sometimes the identity of the messenger is important.
Twitter was super easy to set up with the API to periodically tweet the output of some automated script: a weather forecast, a public safety alert, an air quality alert, a traffic advisory, a sports score, a news headline, etc.
These are the types of messages that you’d want to subscribe to the actual identity, and maybe even be able to forward to others (aka retweeting) without compromising the identity verification inherent in the system.
Twitter was an important service, and that’s why there are so many contenders trying to replace at least part of the experience.