Tux Machines

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and More

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 26, 2024

Scoop News Group ☛ Russian hacking group claims responsibility for cyberattack on Indiana wastewater plant [Ed: It is getting to the point where the media is so bad that any time it doesn't blame "Linux" (by name) for some security incident it is almost immediately implied that it's Windows (but not mentioned by name)]

Remkus de Vries ☛ Upgrade Your WordPress Update Strategy

Whenever WordPress releases a new major version (6.4, 6.5, etc) a lot of people will wait to update their sites until the first minor release. So, for instance, 6.5.1. The idea behind it is have less mission-critical sites find the nasty bugs. Makes sense. I do this as well for my clients.

But this might not always be entirely the best thing to do. Let me explain.

Andreas ☛ Announcing Blog Posts automatically on Mastodon

After a bit of googling I found “feediverse”, which does exactly what I want: It consumes the RSS feed of my site and posts new posts to Mastodon. And it’s just a python script that I can run locally. Perfect.

Education

Seth Michael Larson ☛ Open Source Summit North America 2024

I gave a talk "Embrace the Differences: Securing software ecosystems where they are" which funnily enough had a complementary talk about the ways software repositories can collaborate for security.

My talk focused on how security standards and tools typically want to operate across software ecosystems and differences in standards, tools, maintainers, and user expectations between ecosystems can make that difficult.

Mailing list ARChives ☛ 'Re: Fwd: bad first impression of OpenBSD at install time'

Some common problematic approaches taken by posters include:

* Not demonstrating any awareness of group rules or culture.

In the case of OpenBSD, the 'netiquette' for the mailing lists is laid out at https://www.openbsd.org/mail.html; each point is explained with a rationale.

One thing not mentioned there is top-posting, which is common outside tech communities, but often frowned upon within tech communities. 'Top-posting' involves adding one's reply _before_ the message one is replying to, rather than _after_.

Databases

Marcel Kolaja ☛ MemoryDB: Speed, Durability, and Composition.

Earlier this week, my colleagues Yacine Taleb, Kevin McGehee, Nan Yan, Shawn Wang, Stefan Mueller, and Allen Samuels published Amazon MemoryDB: A fast and durable memory-first cloud database1. I’m excited about this paper, both because its a very cool system, and because it gives us an opportunity to talk about the power of composition in distributed systems, and about the power of distributed systems in general.

Kernel Space

Doug Brown ☛ Why is my CPU usage always 100%? (Upgrading my Chumby 8 kernel part 9)

If you’re new to this series, I’ve been documenting the process I went through upgrading my old PXA166-based Chumby 8’s 2.6.28 Linux kernel to a modern 6.x version. Here are links to parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. At this point in the project, all of the main hardware peripherals were working great. I noticed something odd when running top though. The CPU usage was always really high, and it wasn’t obvious why.

Free Desktop ☛ wayland 1.22.91

This is the alpha release for Wayland 1.23.

Besides numerous bugfixes and protocol clarifications, Wayland 1.23 includes

the following new features:

- A mechanism to set the size of the internal connection buffer used by

libwayland

- An enum-header mode for wayland-scanner to generate headers with only enums

- wayland-scanner now generates validator functions for enums on the server

side

- Protocols can now indicate with a "deprecated-since" XML attribute that a

request, event or enum entry is deprecated

- An API to set a name for a queue to aid debugging

- wl_client_get_user_data() and wl_client_set_user_data() to more easily attach

custom data to a client

- OpenBSD support

- A wl_shm.release request for proper cleanup of this global

Full commit history below.