I’m the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

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  • 95 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I’m sure I’ve said all this before. But still. LLMS are very useful tools I don’t doubt that. The problem that no organisation that is “embracing” AI is really considering is how they work.

    They essentially rewrite code or art or content they have seen before. If they replace developers, artists and authors/article writers wholesale the only source of new content will be, other AI.

    It’s been known from the start that AI feeding on AI very quickly degenerates today garbage in garbage out.

    They are also (currently) unable to innovate. So use of AI is going to stifle innovation or even completely kill it.

    These are the medium to longer term problems that might only be really realised when the developers, artists and authors have moved onto other work and a lot might just not want to come back.

    That’s my main problem with the wholesale use of AI. Used as a tool to complement people doing their job, makes sense and is possible to maintain going forward.


  • Here you go

    #include <iostream>
    #include <csignal>
    #include <unistd.h>
    
    void sigusr1_handler(int signal)
    {
    	std::cout << "Signal USR1" << std::endl;
    }
    
    int main()
    {
    	std::cout << "Installed handler for USR1" << std::endl;
    	std::signal(SIGUSR1, sigusr1_handler);
    	while (1 == 1)
    	{
    		usleep(5000000);	// 5 seconds
    		std::cout << "Waiting for signal" << std::endl;
    	}
    }
    

    That will help you read at least one of them.





  • Linux secure boot was a little weird last I checked. The kernel and modules don’t need to be secure boot signed. Most distros can use shim to pass secure boot and then take over the secure boot process.

    There are dkms kernel modules that are user compiled. These are signed using a machine owner key. So the machine owner could for sure compile their own malicious version and still be in a secure boot context.




  • But this is the crucial thing. It wasn’t in the repository. It was in the tarball. It’s a very careful distinction because, people generally reviewed the repository and made the assumption that what’s there, is all that matters.

    The changes to the make process only being present in the tarball was actually quite an ingenius move. Because they knew that the process many distro maintainers use is to pull the tarball and work from that (likely with some automated scripting to make the package for their distro).

    This particular path will probably be harder to reproduce in the future. Larger projects I would expect have some verification process in place to ensure they match (and the backup of people independently doing the same).

    But it’s not to say there won’t in the future be some other method of attack the happens out of sight of the main repository and is missed by the existing processes.




  • OK so it’s fairly simple. You need to install the acl package (or whatever equivalent package contains getfacl/setfacl. Then you can use that to dump the data from an entire structure into a file (I also then bzip that). Then I backup all installed packages to help with a restore too.

    So the script looks like:

    #!/bin/bash
    cd /etc
    /usr/bin/getfacl -R . | /usr/bin/bzip2 -9 >PERMISSION_BACKUP.bz2
    chmod 600 PERMISSION_BACKUP.bz2
    cd /home
    /usr/bin/getfacl -R . | /usr/bin/bzip2 -9 >PERMISSION_BACKUP.bz2
    chmod 600 PERMISSION_BACKUP.bz2
    cd /root
    /usr/bin/getfacl -R . | /usr/bin/bzip2 -9 >PERMISSION_BACKUP.bz2
    chmod 600 PERMISSION_BACKUP.bz2
    cd /var
    /usr/bin/getfacl -R . | /usr/bin/bzip2 -9 >PERMISSION_BACKUP.bz2
    chmod 600 PERMISSION_BACKUP.bz2
    /usr/bin/apt list --installed | /usr/bin/bzip2 -9 >/root/INSTALLED-PACKAGES.bz2
    chmod 600 /root/INSTALLED-PACKAGES.bz2
    

    To restore you change to the folder the backup was taken from, unbzip the file (or uncompress live via pipe) and use setfacl --restore=<file>




  • I did defederate from hexbear for a while a year or so ago. Just because at the time their users were generally just actively trolling for reactions in pretty much every community, and it just got too the point I defederated. I’ve since removed them from the defed list.

    Generally I agree. But ML seems to have become a bit more clearly biased in their moderation. To me it’s not a reason to defed, but a reason to view the content they do allow in their hosted communities with that bias in mind.