Category Archives: News

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FreeBSD: How Can We Make It More Attractive to New Users?

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I tried FreeBSD 14 on a spare laptop the other day because I had a "Let's see what's going on in BSD Land" urge. Maybe refresh my perspective on the Linux stack. Two hours of fucking around later I determined that the QCA9565 wireless chip-set driver seems to be "half working" and intermittent, or their alarmingly-static-looking wireless configuration system has subtleties I couldn't figure out, as someone who is "pretty good at computers." Next I tried booting the installer on a coreboot'd ex-Chromebook just for sport, it couldn't handle the i2c input devices, so no. It runs OK in a VM but... not on any real hardware I have on hand, and not with any user-facing features that really distinguish it. I do still adore the simplicity of BSD-style rc init, and like the ifconfg extended for the modern era better than the command line soup that is the ip tool, and some other details in that vein, but the overall experiment was not wildly favorable. Also, their much-vaunted documentation is frankly not as comprehensive as the Arch wiki. The HN thread makes it sound like their power management/suspend situation is not really up to snuff for running on laptops right now anyway, though there are reports of a major effort to improve it.
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Archive.org, a repository storing the entire history of the Internet, has a data breach

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Well that's not good.

Archive.org, possibly one of the only entities to preserve the entire history of the Internet, was recently compromised in a hack that revealed data of roughly 31 million users.

A little after 2 PM California time, social media blew up with screenshots showing what the archive.org homepage displayed.

It read:

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China Possibly Hacking US “Lawful Access” Backdoor

Source: Schneier on Security

Article note: Entirely predictable problem was entirely predictable. Backdoors for anyone work as backdoors for everyone who figures out (or steals) how they work. Don't make them or they will be abused.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Chinese hackers (Salt Typhoon) penetrated the networks of US broadband providers, and might have accessed the backdoors that the federal government uses to execute court-authorized wiretap requests. Those backdoors have been mandated by law—CALEA—since 1994.

It’s a weird story. The first line of the article is: “A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers.” This implies that the attack wasn’t against the broadband providers directly, but against one of the intermediary companies that sit between the government CALEA requests and the broadband providers.

For years, the security community has pushed back against these backdoors, pointing out that the technical capability cannot differentiate between good guys and bad guys. And here is one more example of a backdoor access mechanism being targeted by the “wrong” eavesdroppers.

Other news stories.

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We need a real GNU/Linux (not Android) smartphone ecosystem

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Someone who wasn't around for the Maemo era discovers how far we've fallen.
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No evidence social media time is correlated with teen mental health problems

Source: Hacker News

Article note: There certainly are unhealthy things about social media, but I think a LOT of the finger-pointing is the traditional, horrible, "Pointing at the things young people do to escape/work around the actual problems in their life as though the workarounds are the problems." We've done a _really through_ job of excluding young people from most public spaces with explicit policy (You'd get CPS called on you if you let your kids have as much autonomy as used to be normal), over-scheduling to meet dubious competitive pressures, and car-centric (sub)urban design. They are facing broadly diminished prospects in careers and home ownership relative to earlier cohorts, climate change is kicking into high gear, they had developmental years in the pandemic... and now there's an increasing mixture of rent-seeking and policing in the online spaces they gather in as a workaround.
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No evidence social media time is correlated with teen mental health problems

Source: Hacker News

Article note: There certainly are unhealthy things about social media, but I think a LOT of the finger-pointing is the traditional, horrible, "Pointing at the things young people do to escape/work around the actual problems in their life as though the workarounds are the problems." We've done a _really through_ job of excluding young people from most public spaces with explicit policy (You'd get CPS called on you if you let your kids have as much autonomy as used to be normal), over-scheduling to meet dubious competitive pressures, and car-centric (sub)urban design. They are facing broadly diminished prospects in careers and home ownership relative to earlier cohorts, climate change is kicking into high gear, they had developmental years in the pandemic... and now there's an increasing mixture of rent-seeking and policing in the online spaces they gather in as a workaround.
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Nobody knows what happened within the MMC Association in 1998

Source: OSNews

Article note: This is some deep, weird history.

In 1999, some members from the MMC Association decided to split and create SD Association. But nobody seems to exactly know why.

↫ sdomi’s webpage

I don’t even know how to summarise any of this research, because it’s not only a lot of information, it’s also deeply bureaucratic and boring – it takes a certain kind of person to enjoy this sort of stuff, and I happen to fit the bill. This is a great read.

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Switch emulator Ryujinx shuts down development after “contact by Nintendo”

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: The fact that the system is _clearly_ "You can stop your probably-legal-by-precedent activity, or we can ruin you with legal bills." is really distasteful.

Popular open source Nintendo Switch emulator Ryujinx has been removed from GitHub, and the team behind it has reportedly ceased development of the project after apparent discussions with Nintendo.

Ryujinx developer riperiperi writes on the project's Discord server and social media that fellow developer gdkchan was "contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he's in control of." While the final outcome of that negotiation is not yet public, riperiperi reports that "the organization has been removed" (presumably from GitHub) and thus "I think it's safe to say what the outcome is."

While the Ryujinx website is still up as of this writing, the download page and other links to GitHub-hosted information from that website no longer function. The developers behind the project have not posted a regular progress report update since January after posting similar updates almost every month throughout 2023. Before today, the Ryujinx social media account last posted an announcement in March.

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Arch Linux and Valve deepen ties with direct collaboration

Source: OSNews

Article note: I'm super pleased by this situation. Arch is my long-term home, and Valve is being a good citizen and supporting projects they use without coercing them.

When Valve took its second major crack at making Steam machines happen, in the form of the Steam Deck, one of the big surprises was the company’s choice to base the Linux operating system the Steam Deck uses on Arch Linux, instead of the Debian base it was using before. It seems this choice is not only benefiting Valve, but also Arch.

We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.

↫ Levente Polyak

This is great news for Arch, but of course, also for Linux in general. The work distributions do to improve their user experience tend to be picked up by other distributions, and it’s clear that Valve’s contributions have been vast. With these collaborations, Valve is also showing it’s in it for the long term, and not just interested in taking from the community, but also in giving, which is good news for the large number of people now using Linux for gaming.

The Arch team highlights that these projects will follow the regular administrative and decision-making processes within the distribution, so we’re not looking at parallel efforts forced upon everyone else without a say.

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Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: I've been actively reducing my reddit use for some time now, because they've so clearly entered the "Extraction" phase. Don't build your communities in walled gardens.
An image showing the Reddit logo on a red and white background
Illustration: The Verge

Reddit is giving its staff a lot more power over the communities on its platform. Starting today, Reddit moderators will not be able to change if their subreddit is public or private without first submitting a request to a Reddit admin. The policy applies to adjusting all community types, meaning moderators will have to request to make a switch from safe for work to not safe for work, too.

By requiring admin approval for the changes, Reddit is taking away a lever many communities used to protest the company’s API pricing changes last year. By going private, the community becomes inaccessible to the public, making the platform less usable for the average visitor. And that’s part of the reason behind the change.

“The ability to instantly...

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