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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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