Brief items

Security quotes of the week

The trick is for the compiler to recognise what sort of model it’s compiling – whether it’s processing images or text, for example – and then devising trigger mechanisms for such models that are sufficiently covert and general. The takeaway message is that for a machine-learning model to be trustworthy, you need to assure the provenance of the whole chain: the model itself, the software tools used to compile it, the training data, the order in which the data are batched and presented – in short, everything.

— Ross Anderson about a Trusting trust attack on machine learning models

What's the "shitty tech adoption curve?" It's the process by which oppressive technologies are normalized and spread. If you want to do something awful with tech – say, spy on people with a camera 24/7 – you need to start with the people who have the least social capital, the people whose objections are easily silenced or overridden.

That's why all our worst technologies are first imposed on refugees -> prisoners -> kids -> mental patients -> poor people, etc. Then, these technologies climb the privilege gradient: blue collar workers -> white collar workers -> everyone. Following this pathway lets shitty tech peddlers knock the rough edges off their wares, inuring us all to their shock and offense.

20 years ago, if you ate dinner under the unblinking eye of a CCTV, it was because you were housed in a supermax prison. Today, it's because you were unwise enough to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for "home automation" from Google, Apple, Amazon or another "luxury surveillance" vendor.

— Cory Doctorow

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Kernel release status

The 6.1 merge window is open; it is expected to close on October 16. Merging of pull requests was slowed for a few days due to some hardware problems on Linus Torvalds's system, but that has been resolved and the merge window is proceeding as usual.

Stable updates: 5.4.217 was released on October 7 with (among other things) some backported Retbleed mitigations. 6.0.1, 5.19.15, and 5.15.73 came out on October 12.

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Quote of the week

I have had some instability on my main desktop the last couple of days, with random memory corruption in user space resulting in my allmodconfig builds randomly failing with internal compiler errors etc.

When that happens during the merge window, it's obviously a new kernel bug causing problems, which is never a great thing.

Except this time it wasn't - it was literally a DIMM going bad in my machine randomly after 2.5 years of it being perfectly stable. Go figure.

— Linus Torvalds

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Distributions quotes of the week (naming is hard)

Well Red Hat shipped the Yellowdog Update Manager for 2 releases so I am sure they can go with FUM or RUM (RPM Update Manager).. I would avoid Backup Upgrade Manager though.

— Stephen Smoogen

Ugh, acronyms, how boring. If we stay true to the abbreviation equilibristics that gave us DNF coming from DaNdiFied YUM, it's only natural to name the ApPoinTed DNF successor APT.

— Alexander Sosedkin

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VirtualBox 7.0.0 released

Version 7.0.0 of the VirtualBox virtualization system is out. Changes include support for fully encrypted virtual machines, a new performance-monitoring tool, improved theme support, and a number of new devices.

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Patent clouds for the Opus codec

The Opus codec is an audio codec that was designed from the beginning to avoid existing patents in the field and be royalty-free for all users. It was standardized by the IETF in 2012 as RFC 6716. Now a company called Vectis ("a premier full-suite IP licensing and consultancy boutique") is collecting patents that are claimed to read on Opus as a way of demanding royalties on its use. "The planned Opus program will focus on hardware devices and will not be directed towards open-source software, applications, services, or content". (Thanks to Paul Wise).

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