Brief items

Security quotes of the week

The AI doom and gloom doesn't appear to be about fixing existing problems with blackbox algorithms — just about setting up regulations that hand the space over to a few elite and powerful folks who promise that they, unlike the riff raff, have humanity's best interests in mind.

— Mike Masnick

Here is where LLMs [large language models] will make a difference. Much has been written about the unreliability of OpenAI's GPT models and those like them: They "hallucinate" frequently, making up things about the world and confidently spouting nonsense. For entertainment, this is fine, but for most practical uses it's a problem. It is, however, not a bug but a feature when it comes to scams: LLMs' ability to confidently roll with the punches, no matter what a user throws at them, will prove useful to scammers as they navigate hostile, bemused, and gullible scam targets by the billions. AI chatbot scams can ensnare more people, because the pool of victims who will fall for a more subtle and flexible scammer—one that has been trained on everything ever written online—is much larger than the pool of those who believe the king of Nigeria wants to give them a billion dollars.

— Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan

Comments (4 posted)

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.3-rc6, released on April 9. Linus said:

It's Easter Sunday, which means that we're all about to gorge on mämmi (Right? You *do* have your carton of mämmi ready to go, don't you?).

But before the festivities can begin, we still need to take care of business: Sunday still means another release candidate. Those rascally (and biologically confused) egg-laying rabbits must not distract us from kernel development.

Stable updates: 6.2.10 and 6.1.23 were released on April 6.

The 6.2.11, 6.1.24, and 5.15.107 updates are in the review process; they are due on April 14.

Comments (none posted)

Quote of the week

It’s easy to get stuck on function naming. Instead of doing that, just write a first draft of the name without thinking about it too much. Then when you call the function the first time then type what you expect the function to be named. If that’s what the function is actually named, good, you are done. If not then rename the function to what you expected it to be called.

— Dan Carpenter

Comments (39 posted)

FreeBSD 13.2 released

The latest release of FreeBSD, version 13.2, has been released. It contains lots of package upgrades including to OpenSSH 9.2p1, OpenSSL 1.1.1t, and OpenZFS 2.1.9. Other new features include upgrading the bhyve hypervisor to now support more than 16 virtual CPUs in a guest, a WireGuard VPN driver, netlink for network configuration, and lots more. See the release notes for more information.

Comments (none posted)

OpenBSD 7.3 released

OpenBSD 7.3 has been released. As usual, the list of changes and new features is long; click below for the details.

Full Story (comments: 1)

Meta's Buck2 build system

Meta has announced the release of a new build system called Buck2.

While it shares some commonalities with other build systems (like Buck1 and Bazel), Buck2 is a from-scratch rewrite. Buck2 features a complete separation of the core and language-specific rules, with increased parallelism, integration with remote execution and virtual file systems, and a redesigned console output. All of these changes are aimed at helping engineers and developers spend less time waiting, and more time iterating on their code.

Comments (28 posted)

A draft Rust trademark policy

A draft updated trademark policy for the Rust language is being circulated for comments. It is not a short read.

RS can be used freely and without permission to indicate that software or a project is derived from or based on Rust, compatible with Rust, inspired by Rust, or can be used for the same purpose as Rust. We recommend using RS instead of ‘Rust’ if you have any concerns about your use falling outside of this policy, for example, naming your crate foo-rs instead of rust-foo.

Some discussion can be found in this Reddit post.

Update: there has since been a followup note posted on the process being followed in the creation and consideration of this draft policy.

We want to thank the community for participating in this process, and for your patience as we learn the best way to navigate it. We recognize that the process and communication around it could have been better. Notably, the wider project was insufficiently included in the process. We were responsible for that and apologize.

Comments (48 posted)