I can of agree the focus to make Linux easy to use is not exactly on the right things. There is a bit too much of a “make a GUI of everything”. Which is not wrong per say, but should not be the goal. More a mean to an end.

I disagree that users won’t do stuff on their own. They will, but they will allocate very little time to it, on average, especially when compared to a tech savy person. And that’s just because their computer is a tool.And if they cannot make their tool work for what they want to do, they’ll find another way. Or deem it impossible.

I think distro must make mundane tasks such as system maintenance hands off. As an opt-in option not to upset power user. But things such as updates, full system update, disk space reclaiming, … should have a single “do the right thing without being asked to” toggle. Things a bit more complicated such as printing/scanning document should be more context aware. A bit like on smartphone where, if you have a document open, you can select print and, if no printer is configured, you have the option to add one there and then.

Immutable distro have made good progress on that front IMO. But we still need better integration between applications and the Desktop Environment for things like printing, sharing and so on. I’m hopeful though. Generally speaking, things are moving in that direction. Even if we can argue flapak and snap are a step backward with regards to the integration of the DE, this is also an opportunity to formalize some form of protocol with the DE.

It’s not directly related to the torrent or its content no. It’s more related to the potential bugs in Transmission that might be exploited to propagate viruses.

Since Transmission has to exchange data with un-trusted parties, before knowing whether the data is relevant to the torrent you are downloading, anyone could exploit bugs that exist in the parsing of these messages.

So running Transmission as a dedicated user limits what an attacker may have access to once they take control of Transmission through the exploit of known or unknown bugs.

Obviously, this user need to have many restriction in place as to prevent the attacker from installing malware permanently on the machine. And when you copy over data that has been downloaded by Transmission, you’d have to make sure it has not been tampered with by the attacker in an attempt to get access to the data available to your real account.

If you just use transmission occasionally, not on a server, I would not bother with it. Either use the flatpak version for some sandboxing and similar security guarantees as having a dedicated user running Transmission, or use an up to date version (the one from your distro should be fine) and don’t leave it running when you do not need to.

the common practice is to relax the dependencies

I found this a bit disturbing

I find that funny that, since this is rust, this is now an issue.

I have not dwelved in packaging in a long while, but I remember that this was already the case for C programs. You need to link against libfoo? It better work with the one the distribution ship with. What do you mean you have not tested all distributions? You better have some tests to catch those elusive ABI/API breakage. And then, you have to rely on user reported errors to figure out that there is an issue.

On one hand, the package maintainer tend to take full ownership and will investigate issues that look like integration issue themselves. On the other hand, your program is in a buggy or non-working state until that’s sorted.

And the usual solutions are frown upon. Vendoring the dependencies or static linking? Are you crazy? You’re not the one paying for bandwidth and storage. Which is a valid concern, but that just mean we reached a stalemate.

Which is now being broken by

• slower moving C/C++ projects (though the newer C++ standards did some waves a few years back) which means that even Debian is likely to have a “recent” enough version of your dependencies.
• flatpack and the likes, which are vendoring everything and the kitchen sink
• newer languages that static link by default (and some distributions being OK with it)

In other words, we never figured out a proper solution for C projects that will link with a different minor than the one the developer tested.

Well, /rant I guess. The point I’m raising does not seem to be the only one, and maybe far from the main one, for which bcachefs-tools is now orphaned. But I’ve seen very dubious arguments to try and push back against rust adoption. I feel like people have forgotten where we came from. And while there is no reason to go back per say, any new language that integrate this deep into the system will face similar challenges.

I don’t think that’s the issue. As said in the article, the researchers found the flaw by reading the architecture documentation. So the flaw is in the design of the API the operating system uses to configure the CPU and related resources. This API is public (though not open source) as to allow operating system vendors to do their job. It usually comes with examples and pseudo code on how some operations work. Here is an example (PDF).

Knowing how this feature is actually implemented in hardware (if the hardware was open source) would not have helped much. I would argue you are one level too low to properly understand the consequences of the implementation.

By the vague description in the article it actually looks like a meltdown or specter like issue where some code gets executed with the inappropriate privileges. Such issues are inherent to complex designs and no amount of open-source will save you there. We need a cultural and maybe a paradigm shift on how we design CPU to fully address those issues.

It would tend towards centralisation just because of the popularity of certain posters/instances and how scale-free networks behave when they’re not handled another way.

Ah, I get you. That’s true.

making the place less equal, more of a broadcast medium, and less accessible to unconnected individuals and small groups.

I do not think it is a very good analogy. I do not see how this would turn into a broadcast medium. Though I do agree it can feel less accessible and there is a risk of building echo chambers.

How does an instance get into one of these archipelagos if they use allowlists?

By reaching out, I would say. It’s most likely a death sentence for one-persone instances. Which is not ideal. On the other hand, I’ve seen people managing their own instance give up on the idea when they realized how little control they have over what gets replicated on their instance and how much work is required to moderate replies and such. In short, the tooling is not quite there.

I think both models (i.e. allowlist/blocklist) have their own perks and drawbacks and are all necessary for a healthy and enjoyable internet.

I would tend to agree. I think both methods have their merits. Though ideally I’d rather have most instances use a blocklist model. This is less cumbersome to the average user and this achieves (in my opinion) one of fediverse goal of having an online identity not tied to an instance, an online identity you can easily migrate (including comments, follow, DMs, …) if needed.

But the blocklist model is too hard to maintain at this time. There are various initiative to try and make it work, such as fediseer, and it might be good enough for most. But I think it’s a trap we should not fall into. On the fediverse, “good enough for most” is not good enough.

Now that people are fleeing to the Fediverse, we’re just gathering our tribe - and this is a natural phenomenon.

I think there is indeed something of that effect going on as well, this is true. But I do not think this warrants a move to allowlist by itself.

I think the move to allowlist is mandated by the fact that building a safe space for “minorities” is hard. The tools to alleviate issues such as harassment and bigotry are not sufficient at this time to keep those communities fully open.

Which is a shame as I think the best way to fight those issues, as a society, is to have people express themselves and have healthy conversation on issues that are rarely brought up.

But we are not entirely giving that up by moving to an archipelago model. It just means that individuals would have multiple accounts, on different archipelago. The downside is that it makes the fediverse less approachable to the average person.

I think the current technical limitations push us toward this archipelago model.

The thing is, bigotry and racism, to name only two, will exist on any social media, any platform where anyone is free to post something. And since those are societal issue, I don’t think it is up to the fediverse to solve. Not all by itself by any means.

What the fediverse can solve however, is to allow instances to protect themselves and their members from such phenomenon. And my limited understanding, as a simple user, is that’s it’s not possible right now. Not on lemmy nor on Mastodon, if I trust the recent communications around moderation and instance blocking. Not without resorting to allow list.

This is annoying to admit because it goes against the spirit of the fediverse. But the archipelago model is the only sane solution short term IMO. And it will stay that way until the moderation tools make a leap and allow some way to share the load between instances and even between users.

What a shit show. And if it is confirmed that laptop CPU are also affected, even if to a lower extent, AMD will be the only option on consumer hardware in the coming couple of years. Thankfully, Qualcomm entered the scene recently which should stir up the competition and prevent AMD from resting on its laurels.

Enable permissions for KMS capture.

Warning

Capture of most Wayland-based desktop environments will fail unless this step is performed.

Note

cap_sys_admin may as well be root, except you don’t need to be root to run it. It is necessary to allow Sunshine to use KMS capture.

Enable

   sudo setcap cap_sys_admin+p $(readlink -f $(which sunshine))

Disable (for Xorg/X11 only)

   sudo setcap -r $(readlink -f $(which sunshine))

Their install instruction are pretty clear to me. The actual instruction is to run

sudo setcap cap_sys_admin+p $(readlink -f $(which sunshine))

This is vaguely equivalent to setting the setuid bit on programs such as sudo which allows you to run as root. Except that the program does not need to be owned by root. There are also some other subtleties, but as they say, it might as well be the same as running the program directly as root. For the exact details, see here: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/capabilities.7.html and look for CAP_SYS_ADMIN.

In other words, the commands gives all powers to the binary. Which is why it can capture everything.

Using KMS capture seems way overkill for the task I would say. But maybe the wayland protocol was not there yet when this came around or they need every bit of performance they can gain. Seeing the project description, I would guess on the later as a cloud provider would dedicate a machine per user and would then wipe and re-install between two sessions.

This looks like one of those wireguard based solution like tailscale or netbird though I’m not sure they are using it here. They all use a public relay used for NAT penetration as well as client discovery and in some instance, when NAT pen fails, traffic relay. From the usage, this seems to be the case here as well:

Share the local Minecraft server:

$ holesail --live 25565 --connector “holesailMCServer420”

On other computer(s):

$ holesail “holesailMCServer420”

So this would register a “holesailMCServer420” on their relay server. The clients could then join this network just by knowing its name and the relay will help then reach the host of the Minecraft server. I’m just extrapolating from the above commands though. They could be using DHT for client discovery. But I expect they’d need some form of relay for NAT pen at the very least.

As for exposing your local network securely, wireguard based solution allow you to change the routing table of the peers as well as the DNS server used to be able to assign domain name to IPs only reachable from within another local network. In this instance, it works very much like a VPN except that the connection to the VPN gateway is done through a P2P protocol rather than trough a service directly exposed to the internet.

Though in the instance of holesail, I have heavy doubts about “securely” as no authentication seems required to join a network: you just need to know its name. And there is no indication that choosing a fully random name is enough.

On the topic of exposing sequence number in APIs, this has been a security issue in the past. Here is one I remember: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-travel-idUSKBN14G1I6/

From the article:

Two of the three big booking systems - Amadeus and Travelport - assign booking codes sequentially, making brute-force computer guesswork easier. Of the three, Amadeus, through its web portal CheckMyTrip, is especially vulnerable, Nohl said.

The PNRs (flight booking code) have many more security issues, but at least nowadays, their sequential aspect should no longer be exposed.

So that’s one more reason to be careful when exposing DB id in APIs, even if converted to a natural looking key or at least something easier to remember.

I would not have expected anyone to go to ASUS’ office to press the issue. So, good on GN and hopefully will see some long-term results. But seeing how the company has a hard time acknowledging some issues such as the ROG Ally SD card one, I would not hold my breadth.

This is what was used by Benjamin to fix David’s issue with his XPPen stylus. Here is the mail thread where this was discussed.

It’s nice to see it documented now. Hopefully this will extend the support of weird devices such as tablets and game controllers since it should allow user space to “fix” them.

Ah, I see. I think you might need to specify your own pre-scaled texture for those then. By creating a StyleBoxTexture, as many as needed for all the disabled/hover/normal/… effects and use those in your theme. Which is not ideal, but that’s all I have.

Otherwise, if you want to automatically scale your UI, you can have a look at the viewport suggestion from @magikmw and make an auto-loading node that does the necessary manipulations for you. Though it will scale everything, font and icon included.

If you are working with vector font, you can set some global settings that should help.

In Project Settings, tick Advanced Settings and then look for:

General -> Rendering -> Textures -> Canvas Textures -> Default Texture Filter: set to Nearest

General -> GUI -> Theme -> Default Theme Scale: set to the appropriate value, e.g., 4

Note that in this same panel you can set the default theme to your own. Then, as suggested, reload the project for the changes to apply.

If you are working with bitmap fonts, then yes, you have to manually scale the root Control node of all your scenes, while still enabling the texture filter to nearest. But there should be few of them hopefully.

Though, I’m not an expert, so there might be a better way.

The main problem is that dynamic linking is hard. It is not just easier for the maintainers of the languages to ignore it, it removes an entire class of problems.

Dynamic linking does not even reliably work with C++, an “old” language with decades of tooling and experience on the matter. You get into all kind of UB when interacting with a separate DSO, especially since there are minimal verification of the ABI compatibility when loading a dynamic library. So you have to wait for a crash to be certain you got it wrong. Unless you control the compilation of your dependencies, it’s fairly hard to be certain you won’t encounter dynamic linking related issues. At which point you realize that, if the license allows it, you’re better off static linking everything, including the C++ library itself: it makes it much more predictable, you’re not forcing an additional dependency on your users and most UB are now gone (especially the one about raising exception across DSO boundaries, which can happen behind your back, unless you control the compilation of all your dependencies…).

That’s especially true if you are releasing a library where you do not know it’s runtime: it might be dynamically loaded via dlopen by a C++ binary that will load its own C++ library first, but some of your users use the version that is stuck on C++14 and your codebase is in C++23. This can be solved, by playing with LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but the application is already making use of it to load the C++ library it comes with instead of the one provided by the system (which only provides C++11 runtime), and it completely ignores the initial state of the environment variable (how could it do otherwise? It would have to guess the path to the libstdc++ is for a newer version and not the older one provided by the system). Now imagine the same issue with your own transitive dependency on top of that: it’s a nightmare.

So dynamic linking never really worked, except maybe for C when you expect a single level of dependency, all provided by the system. And even then that’s mostly thanks to C simpler ABI and runtime.

So I expect that is the main reason newer languages do not bother with dynamic linking: it introduces way too many issues. Look at your average rust program and how many version of a same dependency it loads, transitively. How would you solve that problem as to be able to load different versions when it matters but try first and foremost to load only one if possible? How would you be able to make the right call? By using semver? If nobody made any mistake why not, but you will rather be required to provide escape hatches that, much like LD_LIBRARY_PATH and LD_PRELOAD, will be misused. And by then, you only “solved” the simplest problem.

Nowadays, based on how applications are delivered on Windows and OSX, and with the advent of docker, flatpack/snap and appimage, I do not see a way back to dynamic linking anytime soon. It’s just too complicated of a problem, especially as the number of dependency grows.

They are fun, especially with the motorized arms, but they are crazy expensive last I checked. There are cheaper options, for Arduino and microbit. But even those are not cheap. They run at at least $30, without the microbit or arduino, for a couple of motors, IR and ultrasonic sensor.

I’ve used scratch to introduce kids (6~10) to programming. It works quite well IMO. They had a laptop with windows. I recommend a touch screen if possible, especially for younger kids. Though at 8~12yo that should not be as much of an issue.

I used it with the microbit from the BBC. While not required, a dedicated piece of hardware makes it much more interactive and fun, for a basic introduction. Basically, the microbit can be turned into a remote control for your characters in scratch for example.

Though, kids get fond of the ability to create pre-programmed scenes. That are not very logic intensive, more like an animated movie. And since they can add their own drawings and voice, they can get very engaged on this sole basis. So the microbit is not required at all.

Though if you want to use it, Microsoft has its own scratch for microbit that is more annoying to use IMO (you need to flash the program every time, which is not easy for younger kids that have trouble with the mouse), but it unlocks all the capabilities of the microbit for even more interactive applications. You can make them communicates through a basic protocol over 2.4GHz radio, control led strips or even robots for example (though the robots are far from cheap for what they are 😕).

Both scratch and makecode (the links mentioned above) have plenty of resources if you want to get a lab going. Personally, I would set my expectation fairly low and plan for many additional small features that kids that are really interested could implement on their own. In my experience, some kids will not be interested at all, not until they see a feature they want to interact with at least. Others will try to see what they can do by themselves, before the lab even begin. But usually, the older they get, the less likely they are to experiment by themselves and they’d rather wait for instructions. Which is a shame, but that’s how it is I guess.

Also, try to make sure they can continue their work from home. Scratch is available on many platforms (though makecode sucks on Android last time I checked) and is trivial to get up and running. That said, importing a project is another matter for kids barely familiar with computers, which is why I would distribute a document aimed at their parent to get them set up.

The reason behind kernel mode/user mode separation is to require all user-land programs to have to go through the kernel to do any modification to the system. In other words, would it not be for syscalls, the only thing a user land program could do would be to burn CPU cycles. And even then, the kernel can still preempt it any time to let other, potentially more important programs, run instead.

So if a program can harm your system from userland, it’s because the kernel allowed it, every time. Which is why we currently see a slow move toward sandboxing everything. Basically, the idea of sandboxing is to give the kernel enough information about the running program so that we can tailor which syscalls it can do and with which arguments. For example: you want to prevent an application from accessing the network? Prevent it from allocating sockets through the associated syscall.

The reason for this slow move is historical really: introducing all those protections from the get go would require a lot of development time to start with, but it had to be built unpon non-existant security layers and not break all programs in the process. CPUs were not even powerful enough to waste cycles on such concerns.

Now, to better understand user mode/kernel mode, you have to realize that there are actually more modes than this. I can only speak for the ARM architecture because it’s the one I know, but x86 has similar mechanisms. Basically, from the CPU perspective, you have several privilege levels. On x86 those are called rings, on ARM, they’re called Exception Level. On ARM, a CPU has up to four of those, EL3 to EL0. They also have names based on their purpose (inherited from ARMv7). So EL3 is firmware level, EL2 is hypervisor, EL1 is system and EL0 is user. A kernel typically run on EL2 and EL1. EL3 is reserved for the firmware/boot process to do the most basic setup, partly required by the other ELs. EL2 is called hypervisor because it allows to have several virtual EL1 (and even EL2). In other words, a kernel running at EL2 can run several other kernels at EL1: this is virtualization and how VMs are implemented. Then you have your kernel/user land separation with most of the kernel (and driver) logic running at EL1 and the user programs running at EL0.

Each level allocates resources for the sub-level (under the form of memory map, as memory maps, which do not necessarily map to RAM, are also used to talk to devices). Would a level try to access a resource (memory address) it has no rights to, an exception would be raised to the upper level, which would then decide what to do: let it through or terminate the program (the later translates to a kernel panic/BSOD when the program in question is the kernel itself or a segmentation fault/bus error for user land programs).

This mechanism is fairly easy to understand with the swap mechanism: the kernel allows your program to access some page in memory when asked through brk or mmap, used by malloc. But then, when the system is under memory pressure, and it turns out your program has not used that memory region for a little while, the kernel swaps it out. Which means your program is now forbidden from accessing this memory. When the program tries to access that memory again, the kernel is informed of the action through a exception raised (unintentionally) by your program. The kernel then swaps back the memory region from disk, allows your program to access the memory region again, and then let the program resume to a state prior to the memory access (that it will then re-attempt without even realizing).

So basically, a level is fully responsible for what a sub-level does. In theory, you could have no protection at all: EL1 (the kernel) could allow EL0 to modify all the memory EL1 has access to (again, those are memory maps, that can also map to devices, not necessarily RAM). In practice, the goal of EL1 is to let nothing through without being involved itself: the program wants to write something on the disk: syscall, wants more memory: syscall, wants to draw something on the screen: syscall, use the network: syscall, talk to another program: syscall.

But the reason is not only security. It is also, and most importantly, abstraction. For example, when talking to a USB device, a user program does not have to know the USB protocol. This is implemented once in the kernel and then userland programs can use that to deal with all the annoying stuff such as timings, buffers, interruptions and so on. So the syscalls were initially designed for that: build a library of functions all user programs can re-use without having to re-implement them, or worse, without having to deal with the specifics of every device/vendor: this is the sole responsibility of the kernel.

So there you have it: a user program cannot harm the computer without going through the kernel first. But the kernel allows it nonetheless because it was not initially designed as a security feature. The security concerns came afterward and were initially implemented with users, which are mostly enough for servers, and where root has nearly as many privileges as the kernel itself (because the kernel allows it). Those are currently being improved under the form of sandboxes, for which the work started a while ago, with every OS (and CPU architecture) having its own implementation. But we are only seeing widespread adoption by userland since fairly recently on desktop. Partly thanks to the push from smartphones where application-level privileges (to access the camera for example) were born AFAIK.

Nowadays, CPUs are powerful enough to even have security features to try to protect a userland program from itself: from buffer overflow, return address manipulation and the like. If you’re interested, I recommend you look at the concept of pointer authentication.