chameleon

This list genuinely looks like some of the marketing they had around Win7 times. No joke.

Snap? Yep, advertised feature. Touchscreen stuff? Absolutely! Better search? Yeah, advertised (and it was true in Windows 7!). New app to make movies? They got it. I guess the Win 7 page was missing Widgets. That was a Vista feature instead…

IRCv3 has extended IRC quite a bit over the past decade, fixing a lot of minor pain points if clients support the fixed versions of the protocol.

Given that the UUID changed, you almost certainly made a new LUKS container, overwriting the old one. That’s bad, because the LUKS header is the only source of the actual encryption key that was used, and making a new one will overwrite both the main header as well as its backup copy immediately. Your password/keyfile/whatever is merely used to decrypt the part of the header that has the actual encryption key, and that’s gone in that case.

Unless you have access to a header backup from before that, there’s a fairly strong chance it’s irrecoverable. I’d suggest going through any archives you might have to see if you have such a backup - most of the instructions on the Gentoo wiki encourage making one, so you might have made one through the power of copying & pasting instructions. Should be a file of around 16MB.

The KeePassXC people are also volunteers and dealing with the fallout of this decision.

Some people are opposed to sudo being a fairly complex program with an awkward to understand configuration language and a couple of methods that can fetch config from elsewhere. Fixing upstream sudo can’t happen because those features exist and are presumably used by some subset of people, so straight up removing them is not good, but luckily doas and sudo-rs exist as alternatives with a somewhat stripped featureset and less footguns.

Others are opposed to the concept of SUID. Underneath all the SUID stuff lies far more complexity than is obvious at first sight. There’s a pretty decent chunk of code in glibc’s libdl that will treat all kinds of environment variables differently based on whether an executable is SUID, and when that goes wrong, it’s reported as a glibc bug (last year’s glibc CVE-2023-4911 was this). And that gets all the more weird when fancy Linux features like namespaces get involved.

Removing SUID requires an entirely different implementation and the service manager is the logical place for that. That’s not just Lennart’s idea; s6, as minimal and straight to the point as it tends to be, also implements s6-sudo{,d,c}. It’s a bit more awkward to use but is a perfectly “Unix philosophy” style implementation of this very same idea.

SO already was. Not even harvested as much as handed to them. Periodic data dumps and a general forced commitment to open information were a big part of the reason they won out over other sites that used to compete with them. SO most likely wouldn’t have existed if Experts Exchange didn’t paywall their entire site.

As with everything else, AI companies believe their training data operates under fair use, so they will discard the CC-SA-4.0 license requirements regardless of whether this deal exists. (And if a court ever finds it’s not fair use, they are so many layers of fucked that this situation won’t even register.)

This is a fork of the evaluator/language implementation/daemon/builder/whatever you want to call it. The other one (Auxolotl) is a fork of Nixpkgs, the repository of build scripts and all the NixOS misc pieces.

Or put into other terms, this is a fork of APT/RPM as well as their associated builder tools, while Aux is a fork of Debian/Fedora/whatever. The Nix evaluator is a much more complex piece of software than most other package managers so it does benefit from having a dedicated team working on it.

Lemmy (and Kbin for that matter) very much do the same thing for posts. I don’t think they fetch URL previews for links in comments, but that doesn’t matter: posts and comments are both fairly likely to end up spreading to Mastodon/etc anyway, so even comments will trigger this cascade.

Direct example: If you go to mastodon.social, stick @fediverse@lemmy.world in the search box at the topleft and click for the profile, you can end up browsing a large Mastodon server’s view of this community, and your very link has a preview. (Unfortunately, links to federated communities just result in a redirect, so you have to navigate through Mastodon’s UI.)

Looking at the implementation, it doesn’t really implement sudoers or tools like sudoedit in any way. systemd-run has already been an existing tool for quite some time and this is really just a different CLI for it. That tool asks systemd to make a temporary new service and immediately run it. That, in turn, requires blanket yes/no approval for org.freedesktop.systemd1.manage-units via polkit.

So with run0, you can either do everything or you can do nothing. In-betweens are just not a thing at the moment. There’s very little new backend code running as root.

run0 bash should behave very similar to something like systemd-run --uid=0 --gid=0 --wait --same-dir --send-sighup --pty --pipe --collect bash and the majority of those options have been available for quite a while.

The point of this is to implement some form of privilege escalation without the SUID mechanism. sudo, pkexec and doas are all SUID.

The base runtime pretty much every Flatpak uses includes xz/liblzma, but none of the affected versions are included. You can poke around in a base runtime shell with flatpak run --command=sh org.freedesktop.Platform//23.08 or similar, and check your installed runtimes with flatpak list --runtime.

23.08 is the current latest version used by most apps on Flathub and includes xz 5.4.6. 22.08 is an older version you might also still have installed and includes xz 5.2.12. They’re both pre-backdoor.

It seems there’s an issue open on the freedesktop-sdk repo to revert xz to an even earlier version predating the backdoorer’s significant involvement in xz, which some other distros are also doing out of an abundance of caution.

So, as far as we know: nothing uses the backdoored version, even if it did use that version it wouldn’t be compiled in (since org.freedesktop.Platform isn’t built using Deb or RPM packaging and that’s one of the conditions), even if it was compiled in it would to our current knowledge only affect sshd, the runtime doesn’t include an sshd at all, and they’re still being extra cautious anyway.

One caveat: There is an unstable version of the runtime that does have the backdoored version, but that’s not used anywhere (I don’t believe it’s allowed on Flathub since it entirely defeats the point of it).

Reproducible builds generally work from the published source tarballs, as those tend to be easier to mirror and archive than a Git repository is. The GPG-signed source tarball includes all of the code to build the exploit.

The Git repository does not include the code to build the backdoor (though it does include the actual backdoor itself, the binary “test file”, it’s simply disused).

Verifying that the tarball and Git repository match would be neat, but is not a focus of any existing reproducible build project that I know of. It probably should be, but quite a number of projects have legitimate differences in their tarballs, often pre-compiling things like autotools-based configure scripts and man pages so that you can have a relaxed ./configure && make && make install build without having to hunt down all of the necessary generators.

Won’t help here; this backdoor is entirely reproducible. That’s one of the scary parts.

This is a fun one we’re gonna be hearing about for a while…

It’s fortunate it was discovered before any major releases of non-rolling-release distros were cut, but damn.

My casual-browsing-only netbook is currently running on a RAID0 setup between the internal eMMC and the microSD card because I think it’s funnier that way. Nothing useful’s stored on there and it’s one nixos-rebuild away from being reinstalled so I don’t mind the inevitable breakage.

This is a shot in the dark, but since the permissions look fine to me, the only other thing that comes to mind is that the SELinux contexts might not have been copied. Fedora is one of the few distros that enables SELinux in enforcing mode right out of the box. That can be very complex to understand if it breaks.

There is a Fedora documentation page about SELinux. The /var/log/audit/audit.log log file should be full of errors relating to your /home if it broke. I believe that stat /home and stat /new_home should display the SELinux context if SELinux is active, and they should be identical.

Also possible I’m totally off the mark, though, it’s just a possibility.

For the port thing, you can set the net.ipv4.ip_unprivileged_port_start sysctl to a lower value like 80 (may need to go lower if you also do email). It also applies to IPv6.

The default of 1024 is for security, but the actual security granted by it is not really that relevant nowadays. It stems from a time where ports < 1024 were used by machines to trust other machines using stuff like rsh & telnet, and before we considered man-in-the-middle attacks to be practical and relevant. Around the start of this millennium, we learned better. Nowadays we use SSH and everything is encrypted & authenticated.

The only particularly relevant risk is that if you lower it enough to also include SSH’s default port 22, some rogue process at startup might make a fake SSH server. That would come along with the scary version of the “host key changed” banner so the risk is not that high. Not very relevant if you’re following proper SSH security practices.

Technically always has, ROCm comes with a “backported” amdgpu module and that’s the one they supposedly test/officially validate with. It mostly exists for the ancient kernels shipped with old long-time support distros.

Of course, ROCM being ROCM, nobody is running an officially supported configuration anyway and the thing is never going to work to an suitably acceptable level. This won’t change that, since it’s still built on top of it.

Even worse than that, they need to be able to make an arbitrary container from an arbitrary attacker-provided Dockerfile, or make fairly arbitrary calls to the Docker daemon (in which case you’ve already lost).

They’re rather uninteresting for anyone self-hosting containers as the runc vuln doesn’t offer a way to escape from within an already running container, while the BuildKit vulns all have fairly odd preconditions or require passing untrusted input. Quite the annoyance if you’re running some kind of public cloud or public CI/CD service, though.

DMA-BUF being marked as “unstable” for a decade was a fucking joke. It’s a protocol that’s required to get any kind of meaningful hardware accel going, which nearly every app does nowadays. Within Wayland circles, it’s been understood it’s not going to change for years, as doing so would break nearly every single existing app, yet all kinds of bikeshedding prevented it from being moved to stable.

Hopefully this marks a turning point for many other similarly important protocols stuck in unstable/staging hell too, like pointer constraints and text input. If devs can’t rely on basic functionality to be present and it takes more than say three years to commit to it, it’s time to admit that either the process or the protocol is broken.