Arti 0.5.0 is released: Robustness and API improvements

Arti is our ongoing project to create a working embeddable Tor client in Rust. It’s not ready to replace the main Tor implementation in C, but we believe that it’s the future.

Right now, our focus is on making Arti production-quality, by stress-testing the code, hunting for likely bugs, and adding missing features that we know from experience that users will need. We're going to try not to break backward compatibility too much, but we'll do so when we think it's a good idea.

Programming Leftovers

• [RFC] Zstandard as a second compression method to LLVM

  The LLVM project currently has support for zlib as a compression algorithm. Usage of it varies from compression of ELF debug sections, to serialization of performance stats and AST data structures. We would like to add Zstandard (A.K.A. Zstd) as an alternative to zlib, which tends to achieve higher compression rates while being faster across the board. Using those for internal tooling could lead to speed improvements in places where we compress AST’s etc, without sacrificing the compressed size of them.

• Porting KCM modules from QtWidgets to QtQuick/Kirigami for GSOC 2022

  I’ve been selected for GSOC this year. My task is to redesign and port the KCMs currently in Qt Widgets to QtQuick/Kirigami Thanks, Nate and David for agreeing to mentor me.

• Rant: One day either JavaScript or AutoComplete will start ww3

• Takedown Notice Wipes Game Boy Advance Emulator From GitHub

  A popular browser-based Game Boy Advance emulator with nearly 100 working games was removed from GitHub this week. The takedown request was sent by the ESA, which acts on behalf of Nintendo and other game companies. The problem hasn't been sorted out completely, however, as nostalgic games can easily find alternatives, even on GitHub.

• Russia’s Conti working on exploits for Intel ME BMC AMT IPMI – Intel ME the biggest security fuck up in computing history – sue Intel

  “The biggest network security threat today is a remote code execution exploit for Intel’s Management Engine.” “Every computer with an Intel chipset produced in the last decade would be vulnerable to this exploit, and RCE would give an attacker full control over every aspect of a system. If you want a metaphor, we are dinosaurs and an Intel ME exploit is an asteroid hurtling towards the Yucatán peninsula.” (https://hackaday.com/tag/intel-me/) Intel might have installed – over the course of at least a decade (to this day?) a closed source backdoor in your computer’s firmware, that might never receive updates and is hard to remove. Once this backdoor is fully cracked, everyone (Russia, China and North Korea) can use it. Having remote control over a server down to the BIOS is a neat feature. [...] another dramatic way to put it: “The biggest network security threat today is a remote code execution exploit for Intel’s Management Engine.” “Every computer with an Intel chipset produced in the last decade would be vulnerable to this exploit, and RCE would give an attacker full control over every aspect of a system.

today's howtos

• Force Users To Use Strong Passwords In Debian And Ubuntu - OSTechNix

  This brief tutorial explains how to force users to use strong passwords using Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) in Debian, Ubuntu and other DEB-based systems.

• How to Get the MAC Address of a Network Interface Card - TREND OCEANS

  You are about to learn what a MAC address is, where they are stored, how they are assigned, the relationship between MAC addresses and IP addresses, and finally, how to get the MAC address of a network interface card.

• How To Install KTorrent on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install KTorrent on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, KTorrent is a full-featured BitTorrent application that allows you to download files using the BitTorrent protocol. Also enables you to run multiple torrents at the same time and comes with extended features to make it a full-featured client for BitTorrent. KTorrent is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the KTorrent torrent client on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

• Ryan Kavanagh's /dev/brain

  I’ve been using OpenIKED for some time now to configure my VPN. One of its features is that it can dynamically assign addresses on the internal network to clients, and clients can assign these addresses and routes to interfaces. However, these interfaces must exist before iked can start. Some months ago I switched my Debian laptop’s configuration from the traditional ifupdown to systemd-networkd. It took me some time to figure out how to have systemd-networkd create dummy interfaces on which iked can install addresses, but also not interfere with iked by trying to manage these interfaces. Here is my working configuration.

EasyOS Dunfell-series 4.2

EasyOS was created in 2017, derived from Quirky Linux, which in turn was derived from Puppy Linux in 2013. Easy is built in woofQ, which takes as input binary packages from any distribution, and uses them on top of the unique EasyOS infrastructure. Throughout 2020, the official release for x86_64 PCs was the Buster-series, built with Debian 10.x Buster DEBs. EasyOS has also been built with packages compiled from source, using a fork of OpenEmbedded (OE). Currently, the Dunfell release of OE has been used, to compile two sets of binary packages, for x86_64 and aarch64. The latter have been used to build EasyOS for the Raspberry Pi4, and first official release, 2.6.1, was in January 2021. The page that you are reading now has the release notes for EasyOS Dunfell-series on x86_64 PCs, also debuting in 2021. Ongoing development is now focused on the x86_64 Dunfell-series. The last version in the x86_64 Buster-series is 2.6.2, on June 29, 2021, and that is likely to be the end of that series. Releases for the Pi4 Dunfell-series are still planned but very intermittent. The version number is for EasyOS itself, independent of the target hardware; that is, the infrastructure, support-glue, system scripts and system management and configuration applications. The latest version is becoming mature, though Easy is an experimental distribution and some parts are under development and are still considered as beta-quality. However, you will find this distro to be a very pleasant surprise, or so we hope. Also: EasyOS Dunfell-series version 4.2 released