Arthur Besse
cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
- 42 Posts
- 62 Comments
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Rust Coreutils cp Ended Up Breaking Ubuntu Image Builds With Latest IncompatibilityEnglish
4·2 months agoBut why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago.
Of course rewriting them will introduce some new issues, but it will also eliminate classes of bugs from which there are definitely still a great many in old “stable” C code (bugs which are now being discovered and will presumably continue to be discovered at a much faster pace due to LLMs).
The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse.
I don’t think it is just an excuse; I believe that improving security is also a goal… but removing GPL code is clearly also part of their motivation :(
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Rust Coreutils cp Ended Up Breaking Ubuntu Image Builds With Latest IncompatibilityEnglish
2·2 months agoNo, it is not a good time. A project like Ubuntu should now be in freeze as they had about 3 months before release

This bug was reported (and resolved by rolling back to the GNU coreutils version of
cp) on June 30, a little over 15 weeks prior to the scheduled release date.Which distros have a feature freeze that far in advance?
Ubuntu hasn’t even scheduled theirs for this release yet; if you edit that url to look at previous releases’ schedules you can see their feature freeze and debian import freezes are typically about 2 months prior to release. (See here for descriptions of all of the different types of freezes…)
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Rust Coreutils cp Ended Up Breaking Ubuntu Image Builds With Latest IncompatibilityEnglish
67·2 months agoWhat an absolute shitshow
I’d say the month of June is actually a good time to be breaking and fixing things in a release that is due to come out in (checks notes) October.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Selfhosted@lemmy.world•Wrote up a full guide for running AI locally on Windows (LM Studio + Ollama + Open WebUI)English
16·3 months agoima keep it real with u chief


Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Technology@lemmy.world•Leak Exposes Details of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ SocietyEnglish
19·3 months agoFor each participant, Dialog logs a membership status, every retreat the person has attended, a biography, a home city, and a private access token. WIRED is not publishing the tokens, which function as login credentials, or the personalized account links that contain them.
This is an odd thing to say given that neither Wired nor their source (“the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew”) appear to be publishing any of the actual data whatsoever, beyond the handful of mostly nonspecific references to it in the article text. (Eg, lots of sentences like “The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.” - omitting names of any of these people.)
Also, the linked archive says:
Update 6/16/2026, 5:47 pm EDT: WIRED updated this article to correct a conflation of two people named Jeff Epstein. A small revision was also made to address a security concern raised by a Dialog representative.
Someone helpfully had already made an earlier archive before that, so we can see what information Wired journalists Dell Cameron and Yulia Almazova removed at the request of a Dialog representative: where it now says “The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at a venue near Dublin” it originally said “The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at the Powerscourt Hotel outside Dublin”.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Open Source@lemmy.ml•Why are there no hard forks of Firefox, Chromium, WebKit, or other browsers?English
321·3 months agoAs others have said it is a huge amount of work to maintain a fork of such a complicated piece of software.
Especially around security: web browsers constantly process potentially-malicious data, which gives them a large attack surface. Every browser regularly has new vulnerabilities discovered which must be fixed. Hard forking a browser means that, even ignoring any bugs in the new code the fork has added, every time a bug is discovered and fixed in the code they forked from someone needs to analyze the upstream’s fix and port it to the fork. The more they diverge, the more work this is. Failing to do this work lets any malicious website exploit the bugs and install malware on users’ computers.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Fediverse@lemmy.world•it would be cool if posts could be geo-taggedEnglish
2·3 months agomoderator reports still don’t federate to other instances
you are mistaken. reports are federated from the reporter’s instance to the community’s instance, as well as to the instances of all moderators of the community, and to the instance of the user who posted the comment or post being reported.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Fragnesia: New Linux Privilege Escalation ExploitEnglish
63·4 months ago
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Dirty Frag: Universal Linux LPE - allows any unprivileged local user to gain root access on a vulnerable Linux system - no patch availableEnglish
2·4 months agothat kernel release (which most distros have still not shipped yet) fixes only one of the two vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-43284); afaik even upstream still doesn’t have a patch for the second one (CVE-2026-43500) at this time.
(for people relying on Linux privilege separation, here are mitigation instructions.)
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Fediverse@lemmy.world•Which instances have the most ban-happy moderators? Analysis insideEnglish
21·4 months agoI was surprised to find that dbzer0 has 290 communities.
I guess they have 290 communities which are federated to the instance where you’re collecting these stats; according to dbzer0’s front page they actually have 332 communities. (Also your screenshot shows 1337 communities on lemmy.ml but we actually have 4.74K, and 3919 for .world which actually has 13.1K.)
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•The ‘European’ Jolla Phone Is an Anti-Big-Tech SmartphoneEnglish
4·5 months agounfortunately, like its predecessor (Nokia’s Maemo/Meego), Jolla’s SailfishOS has never been (and has never had plans to be) fully free/libre open source software.
many components of it are freely licensed, but not nearly enough to constitute an actual mobile operating system you can use.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•How to disable this blinking light on a WD External Hard Drive?English
6·6 months ago
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•How to disable this blinking light on a WD External Hard Drive?English
3·6 months agobased on the other comments here i had to double check if this thread was in !shittyasklemmy@lemmy.ml smh my head
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•CrackArmor: Critical AppArmor Flaws Enable Local Privilege Escalation to RootEnglish
22·6 months agoYou’re correct on both points (🤦♂️ indeed).
I’ve now edited this post to link to their advisory text file instead of their advertising-heavy blog post about it which I had initially linked when the above comment was posted. Thanks.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Open Source@lemmy.ml•Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleftEnglish
1·6 months agoFYI, the day after you published this blog post, a spam blog posted… their AI reimplementation of it 🤦
details:
here is a snapshot of (maybe?) the “original” slop post borrowing from your title; i first saw it reposted on this slightly-more-credible-looking (at least if you haven’t seen it in previous search results and already realized it is spam) page:

i tried to archive that page with the repost of it, to avoid directly linking to spam from this comment, but it crashes archive.org’s browser:

i also was curious to see if this spam is in search engines, so i searched for AI reimplementation, and… well, the good news is that your blog post is the first hit and the above-linked spam blog is pretty far down in the results list.
The bad news is that the second hit is to yet another piece of slop/spam evidently also “inspired” by your post:




















iirc the Linux kernel dropped support for pre-Pentium x86 in the last few years, so any distro with 486 support now would be using an unmaintained kernel.
I think if you want a maintained operating system for your 486 today, NetBSD is probably the thing to run.