Arthur Besse
cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
- 33 Posts
- 49 Comments
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Fragnesia: New Linux Privilege Escalation ExploitEnglish
62·4 days 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
2·7 days 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
21·14 days 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
3·2 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
6·2 months ago
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•How to disable this blinking light on a WD External Hard Drive?English
3·2 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
22·2 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
1·2 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:

Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Open Source@lemmy.ml•Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleftEnglish
6·2 months agoNice post. Relatedly, see also malus.sh and this talk by the people that made it (both of which I posted in this lemmy community here).
A couple of minor corrections to your text:
Blanchard’s account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly.
Blanchard doesn’t say that he never looked at the existing code; on the contrary, he has been the maintainer (and primary contributor) to it for over a decade so he is probably the person who is most familiar with the pre-Claude version’s implementation details. Rather, he says that he didn’t prompt Claude with the source code while reimplementing it. iirc he does not acknowledge that it is extremely likely that multiple prior versions of it were included in Claude’s training corpus (which is non-public, so this can only be conclusively verified easily by Anthropic).
The GPL’s conditions are triggered only by distribution. If you distribute modified code, or offer it as a networked service, you must make the source available under the same terms.
The GPL does not require you to offer GPL-licensed source code when using the program to provide a network service; because it is solely a copyright license, the GPL’s obligations are only triggered by distribution. (It’s the AGPL which goes beyond copyright and imposes these obligations on people running a program as a network service…)
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Konform Browser 140.8.0-106 - Security- and privacy oriented open source web browserEnglish
2·2 months agoNice, thanks.
It would certainly be nice to be able to pre-download language pair models without selecting to and from and then actually initiating a translation using the model i don’t have yet.
re: getting uBlock externally, i also see the attraction of that approach but unfortunately Debian’s package was last updated in October (from 1.62 to 1.67) while AMO has a release from January (1.69) :/
imo it would be better to bundle UBO and ship its updates along with browser updates.
are there plans to distribute Konform via flathub?
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Konform Browser 140.8.0-106 - Security- and privacy oriented open source web browserEnglish
9·2 months agoFull-page machine translations are disabled
Firefox translations are done offline (after downloading the model for a langauge pair).
Does anybody know why Konform decided to disable this very useful feature?
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Curious about the relationship between Red Hat and FedoraEnglish
12·3 months agocould Red Hat eventually take control of the project
Fedora started in 2002 and merged with “Red Hat Linux” in 2003.
Red Hat, Inc has had full control of it ever since then.
It is a “community project” inasmuch as there are Fedora developers who are volunteers (and some who are paid by companies other than Red Hat), and the Fedora Council includes people who are not employed by Red Hat - but the Project Leader is always a Red Hat employee, and if the Council ever has an irreconcilable difference with Red Hat then Red Hat can simply ignore and/or dismiss them.
Red Hat owns all Fedora-related trademarks, and the Fedora Project is not an independent legal entity: it is a part of Red Hat.
If Fedora developers don’t like Red Hat’s decisions regarding the project, they can fork it but they’d need to change the name and find some other sources funding.
Also, icymi, Red Hat became a subsidiary of IBM in 2019.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Programmer Humor@lemmy.ml•Incredible stochastic algorithm, gets more reliable the larger your input, incredibly fast, trivial to implement and deterministic on its inputsEnglish
7·3 months agomaybe it would be better to say that it is stochastically accurate?
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Programmer Humor@lemmy.ml•Incredible stochastic algorithm, gets more reliable the larger your input, incredibly fast, trivial to implement and deterministic on its inputsEnglish
9·3 months ago
also btw icymi, this is a post about LLMs
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Programmer Humor@lemmy.ml•With great power...ignorance is bliss?English
1·3 months agoi think i get Candand (what some Barnes & Noble spam once rendered C++ as?) but, what is borsuk language?
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Programmer Humor@lemmy.ml•With great power...ignorance is bliss?English
20·3 months agoReputable news source “GLOBAL FACTZ”
😂
Fwiw, before reposting this meme, I actually checked to make sure that the underlying “weird news” story here was not solely reported by random clickbait fake news sites but was also covered by an actual news organization.
So in summary. You’re right. Sealed sender is not a great solution. But
Thanks :)
But, I still maintain it is entirely useless - its only actual use is to give users the false impression that the server is unable to learn the social graph. It is 100% snake oil.
it is a mitigation for the period where those messages are being accepted.
It sounds like you’re assuming that, prior to sealed sender, they were actually storing the server-visible sender information rather than immediately discarding it after using it to authenticate the sender? They’ve always said that they weren’t doing that, but, if they were, they could have simply stopped storing that information rather than inventing their “sealed sender” cryptographic construction.
To recap: Sealed sender ostensibly exists specifically to allow the server to verify the sender’s permission to send without needing to know the sender identity. It isn’t about what is being stored (as they could simply not store the sender information), it is about what is being sent. As far as I can tell it only makes any sense if one imagines that a malicious server somehow would not simply infer the senders’ identities from their (obviously already identified) receiver connections from the same IPs.
Sure. If a state serves a subpoena to gather logs for metadata analysis, sealed sender will prevent associating senders to receivers, making this task very difficult.
Pre sealed-sender they already claimed not to keep metadata logs, so, complying with such a subpoena[1] should already have required them to change the behavior of their server software.
If a state wanted to order them to add metadata logging in a non-sealed-sender world, wouldn’t they also probably ask them to log IPs for all client-server interactions (which would enable breaking sealed-sender through a trivial correlation)?
Note that defeating sealed sender doesn’t require any kind of high-resolution timing or costly analysis; with an adversary-controlled server (eg, one where a state adversary has compelled the operator to alter the server’s behavior via a National Security Letter or something) it is easy to simply record the IP which sent each “sealed” message and also record which account(s) are checked from which IPs at all times.
it would more likely be an NSL or some other legal instrument rather than a subpoena ↩︎

















