Brief items

Security quotes of the week

But it doesn't change the facts: it was easier to be excited by technology 20 years ago. Today it requires constant scrutiny and skepticism because of the dubious ethics of an entire industry

— Frisco Uplink (@_danilo) — the whole Twitter "thread" is worth reading

One example of an extension of this technology is the "persona bot," an AI posing as an individual on social media and other online groups. Persona bots have histories, personalities, and communication styles. They don't constantly spew propaganda. They hang out in various interest groups: gardening, knitting, model railroading, whatever. They act as normal members of those communities, posting and commenting and discussing. Systems like GPT-3 will make it easy for those AIs to mine previous conversations and related Internet content and to appear knowledgeable. Then, once in a while, the AI might post something relevant to a political issue, maybe an article about a healthcare worker having an allergic reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine, with worried commentary. Or maybe it might offer its developer's opinions about a recent election, or racial justice, or any other polarizing subject. One persona bot can't move public opinion, but what if there were thousands of them? Millions?

— Bruce Schneier

Given this reality, people who are invested in ML [machine learning] systems can be expected to downplay the consequences of poisoned ML – "How bad can it really be?" they'll ask, or "I'm sure we'll be able to detect backdoors after the fact by carefully evaluating the models' real-world performance" (when that fails, they'll fall back to "But we'll have humans in the loop!")

— Cory Doctorow

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Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.1-rc2, released on October 23. Linus said: "Usually rc2 is a pretty quiet week, and it mostly started out that way too, but then things took a turn for the strange. End result: 6.1-rc2 ended up being unusually large."

Stable updates: The 6.0.3 update, containing over 800 fixes, was released on October 21. The final 5.19 release, 5.19.17, came out on October 24. Then, on October 26, all of 6.0.5, 6.0.4, 5.15.75, 5.10.150, 5.4.220, 4.19.262, 4.14.296, and 4.9.331 were released.

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A Netfilter Workshop 2022 summary

Arturo Borrero González has posted a detailed summary of the Netfilter workshop that was recently held in Seville. "This year, the number of participants was just eight people, and this allowed the setup to be a bit more informal. We had kind of an un-conference style meeting, in which whoever had something prepared just went ahead and opened a topic for debate."

(Thanks to Paul Wise).

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Ubuntu 22.10 released

Ubuntu 22.10 has been released. "Codenamed 'Kinetic Kudu', this interim release improves the experience of enterprise developers and IT administrators. It also includes the latest toolchains and applications with a particular focus on the IoT ecosystem." See the release notes for details.

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Poettering: Brave new trusted boot world

Lennart Poettering has posted a detailed specification for a new approach to "trusted computing" systems.

Central to the proposed design is the concept of a Unified Kernel Image (UKI). These UKIs are the combination of a Linux kernel image, and initrd, a UEFI boot stub program (and further resources, see below) into one single UEFI PE file that can either be directly invoked by the UEFI firmware (which is useful in particular in some cloud/Confidential Computing environments) or through a boot loader (which is generally useful to implement support for multiple kernel versions, with interactive or automatic selection of image to boot into, potentially with automatic fallback management to increase robustness).

This work is evidently the first in a series that will come out of the newly formed Linux Userspace API Group.

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Python 3.11 released

Version 3.11.0 of the Python language has been released. "In the CPython release team, we have put a lot of effort into making 3.11 the best version of Python possible. Better tracebacks, faster Python, exception groups and except*, typing improvements and much more." Among other things, this release claims a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite thanks to the Faster CPython work.

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Gaynor: Buffers on the edge: Python and Rust

Alex Gaynor examines the awkwardness that comes when trying to interface Python and Rust code.

The challenge is that if you want to pass some bytes to a Rust library to parse them (or do any other processing for that matter), the library almost certainly expects a &[u8], and there’s no way to turn a &[ReadOnlyCell<u8>] into a &[u8] safely, without allocating and copying. And of course, the whole point of the Python buffer protocol is to avoid these sorts of inefficiencies.

Therefore, the regrettable solution is that, right now, there is no way to have all three of: efficiency, interoperability, and soundness.

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Mourning Wolfgang Denk

The U-Boot list carries the sad news that Wolfgang Denk, the founder of the U-Boot project, has passed away.

Wolfgang was a pioneer and strong supporter of Open Source, in the time when Linux for Embedded System started its first steps. In many occasions he had strong discussions with customers to explain the advantages of Open Source, and he rejected business contracts if customer was going against his principles. We will miss him.

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