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Friday, June 11th, 2021
| Time |
Event |
| 2:02p |
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libwebp), Fedora (firefox, lasso, mod_auth_openidc, nginx, redis, and squid), Oracle (.NET 5.0, container-tools:2.0, dhcp, gupnp, hivex, kernel, krb5, libwebp, nginx:1.16, postgresql:10, and postgresql:9.6), SUSE (containerd, docker, runc, csync2, and salt), and Ubuntu (libimage-exiftool-perl, libwebp, and rpcbind). | | 10:08p |
Poettering: The Wondrous World of Discoverable GPT Disk Images In a lengthy
blog post, Lennart Poettering describes the advantages of using the unique IDs (UUIDs) and flags from the discoverable partitions
specification to label the entries in a GUID Partition
Table (GPT). That information can be used to tag disk images if a self-descriptive way, so that external configuration files (such as /etc/fstab) are not needed to assemble the filesystems for the running system. Systemd can use this information in a variety of ways, including for running the image in a container: " If a disk image
follows the Discoverable Partition Specification then systemd-nspawn has
all it needs to just boot it up. Specifically, if you have a GPT disk image
in a file foobar.raw and you want to boot it up in a container, just run
systemd-nspawn -i foobar.raw -b, and that's it (you can specify a block
device like /dev/sdb too if you like). It becomes easy and natural to
prepare disk images that can be booted either on a physical machine, inside
a virtual machine manager or inside such a container manager: the necessary
meta-information is included in the image, easily accessible before
actually looking into its file systems." | | 10:40p |
Privacy analysis of FLoC (Mozilla blog) Over on the Mozilla blog, Eric Rescorla looks
into some of the privacy implications of the Federated Learning of Cohorts(FLoC), which is a Google effort to replace
third-party cookies with a different type of identifier that is less trackable. But less tracking does not equal no tracking. " People's
interests aren't constant and neither are their FLoC IDs. Currently, FLoC
IDs seem to be recomputed every week or so. This means that if a tracker is
able to use other information to link up user visits over time, they can
use the combination of FLoC IDs in week 1, week 2, etc. to distinguish
individual users. This is a particular concern because it works even with
modern anti-tracking mechanisms such as Firefox's Total
Cookie Protection
(TCP). TCP is intended to prevent trackers from correlating visits across
sites but not multiple visits to one site. FLoC restores cross-site
tracking even if users have TCP enabled." | | 10:41p |
[$] Code humor and inclusiveness
Free-software development is meant to be fun, at least some of the time.
Even developers of database-management systems seem to think that it is
fun; there is no accounting for taste, it seems. Part of having fun is
certainly allowing the occasional exercise of one's sense of humor while
working on the code. But, as some recent "fix" attempts show, humor does
not always carry through to developers all over the planet. Balancing
humor and inclusiveness is always going to be a challenge for our community. |
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