This list genuinely looks like some of the marketing they had around Win7 times. No joke.

Snap? Yep, advertised feature. Touchscreen stuff? Absolutely! Better search? Yeah, advertised (and it was true in Windows 7!). New app to make movies? They got it. I guess the Win 7 page was missing Widgets. That was a Vista feature instead…

Given that the UUID changed, you almost certainly made a new LUKS container, overwriting the old one. That’s bad, because the LUKS header is the only source of the actual encryption key that was used, and making a new one will overwrite both the main header as well as its backup copy immediately. Your password/keyfile/whatever is merely used to decrypt the part of the header that has the actual encryption key, and that’s gone in that case.

Unless you have access to a header backup from before that, there’s a fairly strong chance it’s irrecoverable. I’d suggest going through any archives you might have to see if you have such a backup - most of the instructions on the Gentoo wiki encourage making one, so you might have made one through the power of copying & pasting instructions. Should be a file of around 16MB.

It’s the second field on the edit profile page. Can’t recommend putting it in, but victim blaming doesn’t help anyone that already did so.

The edit profile page has a statement that “providing your real name can help friends find you on the Steam Community” with no indication that doing so also puts you at the risk of capital-G Gamers. I can see quite a bunch of people thinking that that’s perfectly reasonable and not going to be abused.

The KeePassXC people are also volunteers and dealing with the fallout of this decision.

SO already was. Not even harvested as much as handed to them. Periodic data dumps and a general forced commitment to open information were a big part of the reason they won out over other sites that used to compete with them. SO most likely wouldn’t have existed if Experts Exchange didn’t paywall their entire site.

As with everything else, AI companies believe their training data operates under fair use, so they will discard the CC-SA-4.0 license requirements regardless of whether this deal exists. (And if a court ever finds it’s not fair use, they are so many layers of fucked that this situation won’t even register.)

View -> User Interface, change to Tabbed or Tabbed Compact (or Notebookbar in old versions).

Lemmy (and Kbin for that matter) very much do the same thing for posts. I don’t think they fetch URL previews for links in comments, but that doesn’t matter: posts and comments are both fairly likely to end up spreading to Mastodon/etc anyway, so even comments will trigger this cascade.

Direct example: If you go to mastodon.social, stick @fediverse@lemmy.world in the search box at the topleft and click for the profile, you can end up browsing a large Mastodon server’s view of this community, and your very link has a preview. (Unfortunately, links to federated communities just result in a redirect, so you have to navigate through Mastodon’s UI.)

If you’re a gamedev trying to make a decent mobile game, you’re competing on all the usual fronts like price and perceived quality, but competing for attention has gotten a whole lot harder when [arbitrary card game] has a hour of dailies, [arbitrary gacha game] always has a special campaign going and [arbitrary fake gambling game] is about to have its battle pass end and they’re only halfway through. And that has gone up by so, so much over the past decade. It was never good but it’s gotten absolutely egregious. At this point, even any generic snake clone will have a battle pass.

Every person that ends up committed to a couple of those long-term-commitment games ends up having much less time for other games. And they make a lot of money, which means they also end up having a hell of a marketing budget.

Note Dark Void Zero never really got rid of their draconian, broken DRM. Still has the same old 2010-era SecuROM with half-functioning servers that may or may not permanently go offline on any random day.

It’s not what the buttons look like, it’s what they do. In Krita, making an ellipse involves clicking the ellipse button and dragging it somewhere. You now have an ellipse, and you hold shift if you want to make it a circle instead.

In GIMP there is no direct ellipse tool, there’s only an ellipse select tool, likewise you hold shift to make it a circle. Then you use a menu item to select the border of your selection, getting a popup to let you determine how much pixels you want. And then, you use the fill tool or fill menu item to fill it. That’s a surprising amount of clicks to accomplish what’s most likely the single most common task for anyone opening a screenshot in an image editor. I’m not aware of any easier/faster method to do it. Feels like it should exist, but this is also what you get if you search for how to draw a circle in GIMP, so if it exists everyone’s missing it.

GIMP’s method gives you more power, but you rarely ever need that power. But when you do, Krita also has ellipse select, border select and various fill tools that can be strung together in the same way.

Test files often represent states that can’t be represented in the library proper. Things like “a tree where node A is a child of B and node B is a child of A”, “the previous instruction repeated x times” where x was never set or there was no previous instruction, or weird combinations of mutually exclusive effects. More often than not, you can’t really generate those using the library itself, as libraries tend to be written to reject those kinds of invalid states (there’s only so much you can do in C but in functional programming land, “make invalid states unrepresentable” is a straight up mantra).

Even if you did manage to do that, using the system under test to generate test data for the system under test is generally not very useful by itself; you’d need some kind of extra protections on top to make sure the actual test files continue to be identical between revisions (like hashing them). Otherwise, a major incompatibility could be easily overlooked. But that also makes it hard to make any kind of valid changes to the library at all. Worse yet, some libraries don’t implement everything needed to generate the test files: even xz is missing pieces, for example there’s an lzip decompressor but not a compressor.

There’s some arguments to be made for separating the test system from the main distribution, but the end result will likely be that nobody runs the testsuite at all. It’s difficult enough to get distros to do it in the first place.

These things are always easy to say in hindsight, but I do believe that a closer review of the build system shenanigans used to install the backdoor would have at least raised some questions.

Nobody noticed it because nobody is reviewing autotools spaghetti and especially not autotools spaghetti that only exists as shipped in a tarball. Minor differences in those files are perfectly normal as the contents of them are copied in from the shared autoconf-archive project, but every distro ships a different version of that, so what any given thing looks like will depend on the maintainer’s computer. And nearly nobody has a good understanding of what any given line in a .m4 file is going to ultimately lead to the execution of regardless, so why bother investigating any differences? The maintainer of Meson has a good take on this.

Shipping tarballs without any form of generated files and having a process to validate release tarballs against the repo would be a good step, but is much easier said than done for a variety of reasons. Same thing can be said for shipping without any form of binary files in the repo, there’s quite high value in integration tests and xz’s README for the test blobs has correctly included this paragraph for 16 years:

Many of the files have been created by hand with a hex editor, thus there is no better “source code” than the files themselves.

For any given tag, GitHub will always have an autogenerated “archive/” link, but the “release/” link is a set of maintainer-uploaded blobs. In this situation, those are the compromised ones. Any distro pulling from an “archive/” link would be unaffected, but I don’t know of any doing that.

The problem with the “archive/” links is that GitHub reserves the right to change them. They’re promising to give notice, but it’s just not a good situation. The “release/” links are only going to change if the maintainer tries something funny, so the distro’s usual mechanisms to check the hashes normally suffice.

NixOS 23.11 is indeed not affected.

You’re looking at the wrong line. NixOS pulled the compromised source tarball just like nearly every other distro, and the build ends up running the backdoor injection script.

It’s just that much like Arch, Gentoo and a lot of other distros, it doesn’t meet the gigantic list of preconditions for it to inject the sshd compromising backdoor. But if it went undetected for longer, it would have met the conditions for the “stage3”/“extension mechanism”.

Sam Jones’s FAQ is by far the best single source, links to other solid sources for more in-depth technical details and also lightly debunks a few things.

The main thing sources online disagree on are which distros are affected. That’s because it’s not a simple yes/no and some distros are taking a nuanced approach in their public communication, while others have chosen the sledgehammer in an attempt to get people to upgrade their systems but keep/kept the nuance in the back room where the audience understood not everything was known yet. Some distros are underselling how vulnerable they were, others are overselling it.

Realistically, I think vendors will be trying to push their crap using this attack as leverage. They did it with Heartbleed, Shellshock and the Log4j issue. Their software won’t/wouldn’t accomplish anything, just like it didn’t with those issues, but they’re sure as hell gonna try to make it seem like it does.

The base runtime pretty much every Flatpak uses includes xz/liblzma, but none of the affected versions are included. You can poke around in a base runtime shell with flatpak run --command=sh org.freedesktop.Platform//23.08 or similar, and check your installed runtimes with flatpak list --runtime.

23.08 is the current latest version used by most apps on Flathub and includes xz 5.4.6. 22.08 is an older version you might also still have installed and includes xz 5.2.12. They’re both pre-backdoor.

It seems there’s an issue open on the freedesktop-sdk repo to revert xz to an even earlier version predating the backdoorer’s significant involvement in xz, which some other distros are also doing out of an abundance of caution.

So, as far as we know: nothing uses the backdoored version, even if it did use that version it wouldn’t be compiled in (since org.freedesktop.Platform isn’t built using Deb or RPM packaging and that’s one of the conditions), even if it was compiled in it would to our current knowledge only affect sshd, the runtime doesn’t include an sshd at all, and they’re still being extra cautious anyway.

One caveat: There is an unstable version of the runtime that does have the backdoored version, but that’s not used anywhere (I don’t believe it’s allowed on Flathub since it entirely defeats the point of it).

Unfortunately, it’s definitively an instance of intentional design. This whole consent dialog thing became a booming “consent management platform” industry. Many of them advertise better acceptance rates than the competition, or used to but have removed those claims in more recent times now that the big GDPR boom is over.

This particular dialog is TrustArc, who are infamous. At one point they defended it with a “well, we gotta retry if it fails to make sure your preference is expected, and we can’t know if your adblocker is causing it to fail or if it’s just a fluke”, which is one of those things where they say something that’s not totally wrong but you know they’re lying through their teeth.

Reproducible builds generally work from the published source tarballs, as those tend to be easier to mirror and archive than a Git repository is. The GPG-signed source tarball includes all of the code to build the exploit.

The Git repository does not include the code to build the backdoor (though it does include the actual backdoor itself, the binary “test file”, it’s simply disused).

Verifying that the tarball and Git repository match would be neat, but is not a focus of any existing reproducible build project that I know of. It probably should be, but quite a number of projects have legitimate differences in their tarballs, often pre-compiling things like autotools-based configure scripts and man pages so that you can have a relaxed ./configure && make && make install build without having to hunt down all of the necessary generators.

Won’t help here; this backdoor is entirely reproducible. That’s one of the scary parts.