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Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

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131–140 of 497 posts

Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#131

Fedora upgrades have usually been great, but I jumped the gun on Fedora 44. Sound completely dead with no Pipewire service available. ALSA not responding. Firefox dies immediately if I open a new tab or right click anywhere on the browser itself (inlcuding nightly builds). QEMU refuses to load. Maybe something got completely f'd in the upgrade process.. I never had an issue before having upgraded from Fedora 38 all t…

Fedora 44 here, no issues.

Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#132
post #67

Alternatively, switch to an operating system like FreeBSD which doesn't take a YOLO approach to security. Security fixes don't just get tossed into the FreeBSD kernel without coordination; they go through the FreeBSD security team and we have binary updates (via FreeBSD Update, and via pkgbase for 15.0-RELEASE) published within a couple minutes of the patches hitting the src tree. (Roughly speaking, a few seconds for…

There’s always a guy. It’s great that your favorite distro is definitely safer. An order of magnitude fewer exploits will mean only a few thousand or so, I suppose. Ozymandis used Gentoo.

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Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#133
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s always a guy. It’s great that your favorite distro is definitely safer. An order of magnitude fewer exploits will mean only a few thousand or so, I suppose. Ozymandis used Gentoo.

FreeBSD is not a distro

What does the D in BSD stand for again?

Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#134

This was always a nightmare waiting to happen. The sheer mass of packages and the consequent vast attack surface for supply chain attacks was always a problem that was eventually going to blow up in everyone's face. But it was too convenient. Anyone warning about it or trying to limit the damage was shouted down by people who had no experience of any other way of doing things. "import antigravity" is just too easy to…

[flagged]

Considering the amount of money at stake, Software is a deeply, deeply unserious and careless industry, and a great many practitioners are also deeply unserious and careless people. Yet, somehow the world goes on, these companies siphon up money, and all harms they cause are externalized.

Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#135
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s always a guy. It’s great that your favorite distro is definitely safer. An order of magnitude fewer exploits will mean only a few thousand or so, I suppose. Ozymandis used Gentoo.

FreeBSD is not a distro. It's not even Linux; it's a completely different kernel and operating system that traces back to even before Linux. It's honestly closer to Darwin than it is to Linux; macOS is technically a BSD. (Not FreeBSD though.)

Darwin is its own thing really. There are parts from BSD, there are also parts from Mach and there are also unique parts.

Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#136
To mitigate supply chain attacks like this, I've taken to specifying exact versions in my Rust cargo.toml, and when importing new crates, select the previous-to-latest version. Is this a reasonable mitigation? It bugs me that Swift deprecates the concept of specifying exact versions, it actively pushes you towards semver which leaves the door open to this.

Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#137
post #114

It seems like this round of vulns is going to be significant. What is the right response?

Personally I'm choosing to keep my home server behind a VPN and to enable Lockdown Mode on my phone and laptop for a while until the dust settles. As well as just limiting the software installed to trusted projects only.

VM isolation would still be safe even with these kernel exploits.

Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we're entering a more hardened era of software This is one force that operates. Another is that, in an effort to avoid depending on such a big attack surface, people are increasingly rolling their own code (with or without AI help) where they might previously have turned to an open source library. I think the effect will generally be an increase in vulnerabilities, since the hand-rolled code hasn't had the same amo…

If I hand roll my logging library, I unlikely include automatic LDAP request based on message text (infamous Log4j vulnerability).

I’m seeing a lot of similar things during code reviews of substantially LLM-produced codebases now. Half-baked bad idea that probably leaked from training sets.

Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#140
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH this is a pretty good way of looking at it. Yeah we're seeing an explosion of vulnerabilities being found right now, but that (hopefully) means those vulnerabilities are all being cleaned up and we're entering a more hardened era of software. Minus the software packages that are being intentionally put out as exploits, of course. Maybe some might say it's too optimistic and naive, but I think you have a good poin…

> we're entering a more hardened era of software This is one force that operates. Another is that, in an effort to avoid depending on such a big attack surface, people are increasingly rolling their own code (with or without AI help) where they might previously have turned to an open source library. I think the effect will generally be an increase in vulnerabilities, since the hand-rolled code hasn't had the same amo…

>there's no reason to assume the average author would magically create fewer bugs than the original OS library authors initially did

Have you read this old code? It's terrible and written with no care at all to security often in C. AI is much much better at writing code.

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