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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • No, just because it is reproducible doesn’t mean you are able to (re)produce something that works. With something like fedora silverblue you know that this specific composition of packages and their versions has been tested, and that all the other users run this exact composition as well.

    When you roll your own composition, where you install whatever stuff, you may be the one finding out that there’s some conflict between package a version u.v.w and package b version x.y.z.


  • I encourage you to go to town with whatever crazy setup you come up.

    I just want to note that the reboot-to-update mechanism also has its positive sides, as ancient as it may seem (we do not succumb to windows level backwardness, because that fails to reap the benefits despite requiring so many reboots). Namely, you get atomic updates, hence the name “fedora atomic” for example. That means you have no transient periods where your OS is running in an inconsistent state. Like when you update a traditional distro, the new files/libraries/binaries/kernel-modules do not match anymore what is in RAM, including the currently running kernel. That leads to stuff like the nvidia driver / cuda not working until reboot, running applications failing to load a library they need now etc… The vast majority of times this is no huge problem, but in theory the only way of maintaining a system with it never running in basically undefined state is with atomic udpates.



  • Hab ich mir auch mal gedacht, und habs bereut.

    Ich vermute bei einer solchen Frage lebst du in einer Stadt, und nicht iwo auf dem Land mit Haus und Hof. Suche mal nach Rad-Waschboxen/-Waschanlagen in deiner Umgebung, so Zeug gibt’s. Es gibt sogar Tankstellen die in den Waschboxen für Autos ausklappbare Fahrradständer haben. Und zur Not würd ich es einfach in ner Auto-Waschbox auf den Boden legen und fertig.




  • Yes I know it, and sometimes use it for a little. But the vast majority of things it presents to complete to me feel rather unimportant. My leisure time isn’t exactly plenty, and then I rather do other things I see more value in. Even surface type is mapped most of the time, and I don’t take the effort to map surface quality because it is not used for anything. Maybe I’ll make an App at some point that infers surface quality automatically while road biking from the acceleration sensor in the phone mounted to the handlebar…



  • As far as I understand, in this case opaque binary test data was gradually added to the repository. Also the built binaries did not correspond 1:1 with the code in the repo due to some buildchain reasons. Stuff like this makes it difficult to spot deliberately placed bugs or backdors.

    I think some measures can be:

    • establish reproducible builds in CI/CD pipelines
    • ban opaque data from the repository. I read some people expressing justification for this test-data being opaque, but that is nonsense. There’s no reason why you couldn’t compress+decompress a lengthy creative commons text, or for binary data encrypt that text with a public password, or use a sequence from a pseudo random number generator with a known seed, or a past compiled binary of this very software, or … or … or …
    • establish technologies that make it hard to place integer overflows or deliberately miss array ends. That would make it a lot harder to plant a misbehavement in the code without it being so obvious that others note easily. Rust, Linters, Valgrind etc. would be useful things for that.

    So I think from a technical perspective there are ways to at least give attackers a hard time when trying to place covert backdoors. The larger problem is likely who does the work, because scalability is just such a hard problem with open source. Ultimately I think we need to come together globally and bear this work with many shoulders. For example the “prossimo” project by the Internet Security Research Group (the organisation behind Let’s Encrypt) is working on bringing memory safety to critical projects: https://www.memorysafety.org/ I also sincerely hope the german Sovereign Tech Fund ( https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/ ) takes this incident as a new angle to the outstanding work they’re doing. And ultimately, we need many more such organisations and initiatives from both private companies as well as the public sector to protect the technology that runs our societies together.







  • True words. The sustained effort to keep something in decent shape over years is not to be underestimated. Now when life changes and one is not able or willing anymore to invest that amount of time, ill-timed issues can become quite the burden. At one point I decided to cut down on that by doing a better founded setup, that does backup with easy rollback automatically, and updates semi-automatically. I rely on my server(s), and all from having this idea to having it decently implemented took me a number of months. Just because time for such activities is limited, and getting a complex and intertwined system like this reliably and fault tolerant automated and monitored is simply something else than spinning up a one off service


  • And they believe all employees actually remember so many wildly different and long passwords, and change them regularly to wildly different ones? All this leads to is a single password that barely makes it over the minimum requirements, and a suffix for the stage (like 1 for boot, 2 for bitlocker etc), and then another suffix for the month they changed it. All of that then on sticky notes on the screen.