This "untrusted data" patch series from Benno Lossin is the result of conversations at last weekend's Rust Linux kernel conference in Copenhagen:

https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240913112643.542914-1-benno.lossin@proton.me/

It's not a "silver bullet" for why we should be using rust in the Linux kernel, but it is a "big giant sledgehammer" to help squash and prevent from happening MANY common types of kernel vulnerabilities and bugs (remember, "all input is evil!" and this change forces you to always be aware of that, which is something that C in the kernel does not.)

I had always felt that Rust was the future for what we need to do in Linux, but now I'm sure, because if we can do stuff like this, with no overhead involved (it's all checked at build time), then we would be foolish not to give it a real try.

And yes, I've asked for this for years from the C developers, and maybe we can also do it there, but it's not obvious how and no one has come up with a way to do so. Maybe now they will have some more incentive :)

@elmiko
safety first. i was not aware, that 'sulin' has also own condom. even it looks more like tampon.

@lkundrak
dualboot in autoexec.bat :) sweet memories. at work we had scsi iomedia jaz drive (1gb) and iomega zip drive 100mb. i had them formatted as bootable in windows and only autoexec.bat there. few months later bootable cd with installer of red hat 5.1 manhattan for 150 czk.
umsdos replaced by ext2.

@slp

Hillel Wayne has advice for new software developers. Worth reading, even if you aren't new to the field.

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/advice-for-new-software-devs-whove-read-all-those/

@ljs
another one? :)
@oleksandr @rostedt

@oleksandr
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1337 mentions some events, but i see no ratification/comitee/whatever for c language :)
@ljs @rostedt

“The reason why [the Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Meta oligopoly] and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.”
https://fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/

@lkundrak
isn't czech language beautiful?
return +/- 90y back to times of voskovec and werich and their forbinas (vsi vod ni a vsi vodni). nanosekunda is calling for such scetch/forbina :)

(edit: i can't resist:
werich: (koukaje na voskovce) nad cim premyslis?
voskovec: jak dlouha je nanosekunda? a da se to vubec zmerit?
werich: vsechno se da zmerit a nezalezi jestli je na nose, nebo na necem jinym. dlouha je, dle meho soudu, stejne )

@ljs @pony @vbabka

@pony
i went on karosa from pilsen to brno 20y ago. i think it was 7 or 8 hours with scheduled breaks in tabor and jihlava. drinked almost whole bottle of dobra voda while waiting for the bus in the long queue.
when i saw karosa, i realised drinking before departure was not good idea. every stop i evaluated possibilities to pee. i gave up after 1.5h and went to driver and asked him to stop. response was that in tabor is scheduled break and that there are toilets on station.
last minutes before tabor i saw black mist.
even i didn't drinked situation repeated before jihlava.

@lkundrak @ljs @vbabka

Something I've learned from my experience working in software development: If you measure software developers (and probably any people) on any metric, they will change their behavior to optimize for that number. They will do this even if you don't reward or punish or judge or evaluate them using that metric. If they know the metric, they will change their behavior.

This means you need to be very, very careful that anything you measure is what you want people to optimize for.

my university has converted our office telephones to Microsoft Teams. when i grumbled about this to a favourite sysadmin, this is how they responded 🔥

“Microsoft has actually brilliantly leveraged the lousy security landscape -- for which they are in no small part responsible -- to capture even larger market-share, as we now need commercial entities to produce the software required to protect us from their failures, and therefore need a more uniform environment to achieve the necessary scale. The uniformity then guarantees an ever greater scale for the inevitable conflagration. Monocultures guarantee one big fire instead of a bunch of small survivable ones. We really have no interest in learning from evolution, in no small part because it would produce fewer billionaires.

— Local Cranky IT Guy” [shared with permission]

#Enshittification

I spent a not insignificant part of today hoping that a solar storm would come and make computing impossible for a little while.

Imagine if #Firefox, #Chrome, and their derivatives could render Markdown, AsciiDoc, LaTeX, EPUB, and Gemtext as seamlessly as they handle PDFs. This could revolutionize the way we publish lightweight websites, making it as simple as dropping a text file into a directory.

#smolweb #smallweb #indieweb

(somebody knows an influential person at @mozilla ?)

@allsystemsgo i heard that some systems are actually not go today

@lkundrak
actually periodontitis is more prevalent in male population :) maybe ladies rubs more borshtsch into their gums
@oleksandr

@oleksandr
maybe it will be beneficial to gums as prevention of periodontitis
@lkundrak

@oleksandr
depends on fineness of grinding probably. dehydrated soups were never sniffing friendly. except some pea soups i recall from childhood, it was powder only
@lkundrak

A tribute to Daniel Bristot de Oliveira from Linux Plumbers. https://lpc.events/blog/current/index.php/2024/07/06/in-memory-of-daniel-bristot-de-oliveira/

I'm really really really not interested in computers getting more powerful.
I am super interested in them being more repairable and modifiable, drawing less power, lasting and being supported for way longer etc. That stuff still gets me excited

@hny

@vbabka @oleksandr @pony @lkundrak