chameleon

chameleon, 8 days ago

IRCv3 has extended IRC quite a bit over the past decade, fixing a lot of minor pain points if clients support the fixed versions of the protocol.

chameleon, 24 days ago

Given that the UUID changed, you almost certainly made a new LUKS container, overwriting the old one. That's bad, because the LUKS header is the only source of the actual encryption key that was used, and making a new one will overwrite both the main header as well as its backup copy immediately. Your password/keyfile/whatever is merely used to decrypt the part of the header that has the actual encryption key, and that's gone in that case.

Unless you have access to a header backup from before that, there's a fairly strong chance it's irrecoverable. I'd suggest going through any archives you might have to see if you have such a backup - most of the instructions on the Gentoo wiki encourage making one, so you might have made one through the power of copying & pasting instructions. Should be a file of around 16MB.

chameleon, 24 days ago

It's the second field on the edit profile page. Can't recommend putting it in, but victim blaming doesn't help anyone that already did so.

The edit profile page has a statement that "providing your real name can help friends find you on the Steam Community" with no indication that doing so also puts you at the risk of capital-G Gamers. I can see quite a bunch of people thinking that that's perfectly reasonable and not going to be abused.

chameleon, 26 days ago

The KeePassXC people are also volunteers and dealing with the fallout of this decision.

chameleon, 28 days ago

Some people are opposed to sudo being a fairly complex program with an awkward to understand configuration language and a couple of methods that can fetch config from elsewhere. Fixing upstream sudo can't happen because those features exist and are presumably used by some subset of people, so straight up removing them is not good, but luckily doas and sudo-rs exist as alternatives with a somewhat stripped featureset and less footguns.

Others are opposed to the concept of SUID. Underneath all the SUID stuff lies far more complexity than is obvious at first sight. There's a pretty decent chunk of code in glibc's libdl that will treat all kinds of environment variables differently based on whether an executable is SUID, and when that goes wrong, it's reported as a glibc bug (last year's glibc CVE-2023-4911 was this). And that gets all the more weird when fancy Linux features like namespaces get involved.

Removing SUID requires an entirely different implementation and the service manager is the logical place for that. That's not just Lennart's idea; s6, as minimal and straight to the point as it tends to be, also implements s6-sudo{,d,c}. It's a bit more awkward to use but is a perfectly "Unix philosophy" style implementation of this very same idea.

chameleon, 1 month ago

This is a fork of the evaluator/language implementation/daemon/builder/whatever you want to call it. The other one (Auxolotl) is a fork of Nixpkgs, the repository of build scripts and all the NixOS misc pieces.

Or put into other terms, this is a fork of APT/RPM as well as their associated builder tools, while Aux is a fork of Debian/Fedora/whatever. The Nix evaluator is a much more complex piece of software than most other package managers so it does benefit from having a dedicated team working on it.

chameleon, 1 month ago

If you're a gamedev trying to make a decent mobile game, you're competing on all the usual fronts like price and perceived quality, but competing for attention has gotten a whole lot harder when [arbitrary card game] has a hour of dailies, [arbitrary gacha game] always has a special campaign going and [arbitrary fake gambling game] is about to have its battle pass end and they're only halfway through. And that has gone up by so, so much over the past decade. It was never good but it's gotten absolutely egregious. At this point, even any generic snake clone will have a battle pass.

Every person that ends up committed to a couple of those long-term-commitment games ends up having much less time for other games. And they make a lot of money, which means they also end up having a hell of a marketing budget.

chameleon, 1 month ago

The point of this is to implement some form of privilege escalation without the SUID mechanism. sudo, pkexec and doas are all SUID.

chameleon, 1 month ago

Looking at the implementation, it doesn't really implement sudoers or tools like sudoedit in any way. systemd-run has already been an existing tool for quite some time and this is really just a different CLI for it. That tool asks systemd to make a temporary new service and immediately run it. That, in turn, requires blanket yes/no approval for org.freedesktop.systemd1.manage-units via polkit.

So with run0, you can either do everything or you can do nothing. In-betweens are just not a thing at the moment. There's very little new backend code running as root.

run0 bash should behave very similar to something like systemd-run --uid=0 --gid=0 --wait --same-dir --send-sighup --pty --pipe --collect bash and the majority of those options have been available for quite a while.

chameleon, 1 month ago

Note Dark Void Zero never really got rid of their draconian, broken DRM. Still has the same old 2010-era SecuROM with half-functioning servers that may or may not permanently go offline on any random day.

chameleon, 1 month ago

It's not what the buttons look like, it's what they do. In Krita, making an ellipse involves clicking the ellipse button and dragging it somewhere. You now have an ellipse, and you hold shift if you want to make it a circle instead.

In GIMP there is no direct ellipse tool, there's only an ellipse select tool, likewise you hold shift to make it a circle. Then you use a menu item to select the border of your selection, getting a popup to let you determine how much pixels you want. And then, you use the fill tool or fill menu item to fill it. That's a surprising amount of clicks to accomplish what's most likely the single most common task for anyone opening a screenshot in an image editor. I'm not aware of any easier/faster method to do it. Feels like it should exist, but this is also what you get if you search for how to draw a circle in GIMP, so if it exists everyone's missing it.

GIMP's method gives you more power, but you rarely ever need that power. But when you do, Krita also has ellipse select, border select and various fill tools that can be strung together in the same way.

chameleon, 2 months ago

These things are always easy to say in hindsight, but I do believe that a closer review of the build system shenanigans used to install the backdoor would have at least raised some questions.

Nobody noticed it because nobody is reviewing autotools spaghetti and especially not autotools spaghetti that only exists as shipped in a tarball. Minor differences in those files are perfectly normal as the contents of them are copied in from the shared autoconf-archive project, but every distro ships a different version of that, so what any given thing looks like will depend on the maintainer's computer. And nearly nobody has a good understanding of what any given line in a .m4 file is going to ultimately lead to the execution of regardless, so why bother investigating any differences? The maintainer of Meson has a good take on this.

Shipping tarballs without any form of generated files and having a process to validate release tarballs against the repo would be a good step, but is much easier said than done for a variety of reasons. Same thing can be said for shipping without any form of binary files in the repo, there's quite high value in integration tests and xz's README for the test blobs has correctly included this paragraph for 16 years:

Many of the files have been created by hand with a hex editor, thus there is no better "source code" than the files themselves.

chameleon, 2 months ago

Test files often represent states that can't be represented in the library proper. Things like "a tree where node A is a child of B and node B is a child of A", "the previous instruction repeated x times" where x was never set or there was no previous instruction, or weird combinations of mutually exclusive effects. More often than not, you can't really generate those using the library itself, as libraries tend to be written to reject those kinds of invalid states (there's only so much you can do in C but in functional programming land, "make invalid states unrepresentable" is a straight up mantra).

Even if you did manage to do that, using the system under test to generate test data for the system under test is generally not very useful by itself; you'd need some kind of extra protections on top to make sure the actual test files continue to be identical between revisions (like hashing them). Otherwise, a major incompatibility could be easily overlooked. But that also makes it hard to make any kind of valid changes to the library at all. Worse yet, some libraries don't implement everything needed to generate the test files: even xz is missing pieces, for example there's an lzip decompressor but not a compressor.

There's some arguments to be made for separating the test system from the main distribution, but the end result will likely be that nobody runs the testsuite at all. It's difficult enough to get distros to do it in the first place.

chameleon, 2 months ago

You're looking at the wrong line. NixOS pulled the compromised source tarball just like nearly every other distro, and the build ends up running the backdoor injection script.

It's just that much like Arch, Gentoo and a lot of other distros, it doesn't meet the gigantic list of preconditions for it to inject the sshd compromising backdoor. But if it went undetected for longer, it would have met the conditions for the "stage3"/"extension mechanism".

chameleon, 2 months ago

For any given tag, GitHub will always have an autogenerated "archive/" link, but the "release/" link is a set of maintainer-uploaded blobs. In this situation, those are the compromised ones. Any distro pulling from an "archive/" link would be unaffected, but I don't know of any doing that.

The problem with the "archive/" links is that GitHub reserves the right to change them. They're promising to give notice, but it's just not a good situation. The "release/" links are only going to change if the maintainer tries something funny, so the distro's usual mechanisms to check the hashes normally suffice.

NixOS 23.11 is indeed not affected.

chameleon, 2 months ago

Sam Jones's FAQ is by far the best single source, links to other solid sources for more in-depth technical details and also lightly debunks a few things.

The main thing sources online disagree on are which distros are affected. That's because it's not a simple yes/no and some distros are taking a nuanced approach in their public communication, while others have chosen the sledgehammer in an attempt to get people to upgrade their systems but keep/kept the nuance in the back room where the audience understood not everything was known yet. Some distros are underselling how vulnerable they were, others are overselling it.

chameleon, 2 months ago

Realistically, I think vendors will be trying to push their crap using this attack as leverage. They did it with Heartbleed, Shellshock and the Log4j issue. Their software won't/wouldn't accomplish anything, just like it didn't with those issues, but they're sure as hell gonna try to make it seem like it does.

chameleon, 2 months ago

This is a fun one we're gonna be hearing about for a while...

It's fortunate it was discovered before any major releases of non-rolling-release distros were cut, but damn.

chameleon, 2 months ago

Won't help here; this backdoor is entirely reproducible. That's one of the scary parts.

chameleon, 2 months ago

Reproducible builds generally work from the published source tarballs, as those tend to be easier to mirror and archive than a Git repository is. The GPG-signed source tarball includes all of the code to build the exploit.

The Git repository does not include the code to build the backdoor (though it does include the actual backdoor itself, the binary "test file", it's simply disused).

Verifying that the tarball and Git repository match would be neat, but is not a focus of any existing reproducible build project that I know of. It probably should be, but quite a number of projects have legitimate differences in their tarballs, often pre-compiling things like autotools-based configure scripts and man pages so that you can have a relaxed ./configure && make && make install build without having to hunt down all of the necessary generators.

chameleon, 2 months ago

The base runtime pretty much every Flatpak uses includes xz/liblzma, but none of the affected versions are included. You can poke around in a base runtime shell with flatpak run --command=sh org.freedesktop.Platform//23.08 or similar, and check your installed runtimes with flatpak list --runtime.

23.08 is the current latest version used by most apps on Flathub and includes xz 5.4.6. 22.08 is an older version you might also still have installed and includes xz 5.2.12. They're both pre-backdoor.

It seems there's an issue open on the freedesktop-sdk repo to revert xz to an even earlier version predating the backdoorer's significant involvement in xz, which some other distros are also doing out of an abundance of caution.

So, as far as we know: nothing uses the backdoored version, even if it did use that version it wouldn't be compiled in (since org.freedesktop.Platform isn't built using Deb or RPM packaging and that's one of the conditions), even if it was compiled in it would to our current knowledge only affect sshd, the runtime doesn't include an sshd at all, and they're still being extra cautious anyway.

One caveat: There is an unstable version of the runtime that does have the backdoored version, but that's not used anywhere (I don't believe it's allowed on Flathub since it entirely defeats the point of it).

chameleon, 2 months ago

My casual-browsing-only netbook is currently running on a RAID0 setup between the internal eMMC and the microSD card because I think it's funnier that way. Nothing useful's stored on there and it's one nixos-rebuild away from being reinstalled so I don't mind the inevitable breakage.

chameleon, 2 months ago

Someone hacked in a clear (in-game). First time it happened to this level, but not the first time it happened overall.

chameleon, 2 months ago

sudo mv /etc/default/grub /root/old_etcdefaultgrub to get it out of the way, then sudo dnf reinstall /etc/default/grub to reinstall the package that provides it, giving you a fresh unmodified copy. Should work for practically any config file on Fedora.

chameleon, 2 months ago

Storj is blockchain stuff with the storage and bandwidth provided by individual node operators. They've kinda tried to bury the whole blockchain stuff and generally keep it removed from their main signup/pricing/usage flow; customers pay in USD and never have to see any of it. But it's still there in the background and it's still the main reward system for node operators.

There's some clickwrapped T&Cs for operators that set some minimum requirements, they've made sure one node leaving doesn't cause data loss, but I'd still be very wary of using them for anything irreplaceable. It only takes one crypto crash or the like for the whole thing to die out, and while they might end up suing some guys running an old NAS out of their garage, that's not gonna get your data back.

chameleon, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Already been done, there's a data dump of every MM1 course on archive.org. The dump is dated but it came after level uploads for MM1 were shut down so it should be about as complete as it gets, minus courses deleted by Nintendo before that.

Actually playing anything seems to be quite complex but there's some instructions in the reviews, so it should be doable for someone to set up a replacement server in the future (Pretendo network already has the basics for custom Wii U online running).

chameleon, 3 months ago

This is a shot in the dark, but since the permissions look fine to me, the only other thing that comes to mind is that the SELinux contexts might not have been copied. Fedora is one of the few distros that enables SELinux in enforcing mode right out of the box. That can be very complex to understand if it breaks.

There is a Fedora documentation page about SELinux. The /var/log/audit/audit.log log file should be full of errors relating to your /home if it broke. I believe that stat /home and stat /new_home should display the SELinux context if SELinux is active, and they should be identical.

Also possible I'm totally off the mark, though, it's just a possibility.

chameleon, 3 months ago

I don't think Factorio is suitable for a first-time gamer. The way the inventory, hotbar and the map work aren't immediately obvious if you've never played a game. If you do try, at least turn biters off. The time pressure that's added by having to set up defense would be difficult enough to handle, but offensive combat is quite the struggle if you're still trying to learn basic gaming controls. You'd be dealing with things like swapping hotbars to one with grenades & stuff, control schemes changing the moment you get into a vehicle and weird targeting quirks. And by the time you get to trains or advanced oil cracking quite a lot of people tend to drop off the game in general.

I'd start with something like Minecraft on peaceful difficulty, then give easy or normal a try after a couple of hours if that goes well. Peaceful leaves time to learn all the basic controls and is fun enough to run around in by itself, and you're not going to get blasted by a creeper that fell behind you.

chameleon, 3 months ago

For the port thing, you can set the net.ipv4.ip_unprivileged_port_start sysctl to a lower value like 80 (may need to go lower if you also do email). It also applies to IPv6.

The default of 1024 is for security, but the actual security granted by it is not really that relevant nowadays. It stems from a time where ports < 1024 were used by machines to trust other machines using stuff like rsh & telnet, and before we considered man-in-the-middle attacks to be practical and relevant. Around the start of this millennium, we learned better. Nowadays we use SSH and everything is encrypted & authenticated.

The only particularly relevant risk is that if you lower it enough to also include SSH's default port 22, some rogue process at startup might make a fake SSH server. That would come along with the scary version of the "host key changed" banner so the risk is not that high. Not very relevant if you're following proper SSH security practices.

chameleon, 3 months ago

Technically always has, ROCm comes with a "backported" amdgpu module and that's the one they supposedly test/officially validate with. It mostly exists for the ancient kernels shipped with old long-time support distros.

Of course, ROCM being ROCM, nobody is running an officially supported configuration anyway and the thing is never going to work to an suitably acceptable level. This won't change that, since it's still built on top of it.

chameleon, 4 months ago

Even worse than that, they need to be able to make an arbitrary container from an arbitrary attacker-provided Dockerfile, or make fairly arbitrary calls to the Docker daemon (in which case you've already lost).

They're rather uninteresting for anyone self-hosting containers as the runc vuln doesn't offer a way to escape from within an already running container, while the BuildKit vulns all have fairly odd preconditions or require passing untrusted input. Quite the annoyance if you're running some kind of public cloud or public CI/CD service, though.

chameleon, 4 months ago

Takuro's own JP Twitter bio (urokuta_ja) claims involvement with both Pocketpair's games and Coincheck.

chameleon, 4 months ago

Quest 64 French Vanilla more or less is that mod. Not totally sure what I think of it though. It's a huge improvement over the game's mechanics, but this is also one of those games where all the weird balancing quirks are part of the game's charm.

chameleon, 6 months ago

DSP doesn't have builtin controller support, so I'd be leery recommending it for Deck unless you're used to more complicated manual input mapping. Hardware-wise, it's more than capable as long as you don't go megabasing postgame.

DSP also doesn't do cloud saves, so you gotta be careful with your wineprefix.

chameleon, 6 months ago

I think most people don't realize how unusual their company structure is. It feels like it's set up to let them do exactly that. As far as I can tell, once you look past the smoke and mirrors, the board effectively controls both the non-profit and the for-profit.

chameleon, 7 months ago

AWS has a shitton of in-house "Graviton" ARM stuff available and the ARM server chips from Ampere are popping up in more and more places as well. Most Linux servery distros have ARM images available now, and most software builds without major changes. It's a slow transition but it's already happening.

chameleon, 7 months ago

The badness this game had at launch really can't be overstated, though. At launch, this was a paid early access always online mostly-singleplayer-with-coop game with a premium currency shop and a battle pass. And it was one of those games where the shop was the most fleshed out part.

They've added offline mode and are now reworking the microtransactions to Steam DLC, but I'm still very skeptical of them. That launch was so blatantly over the top bad.