today's leftovers

• Linux 5.15 Is Now Slightly Less Broken For The DEC Alpha "Jensen" - Phoronix

  One has to wonder how much longer the Linux kernel will keep around some very old and known to be borked hardware support but at least for now the DECpc AXP 150 "Jensen" platform support is sticking around and with Linux 5.15 is no longer marked as "broken" outright. The past four years the Linux kernel Kconfig for the DEC Alpha Jensen platform has marked it as "BROKEN" since it was known to not even compile due to a build error... With Linux 5.15 that Jensen system code now has its four lines of moved around code so it can at least build correctly. So with a change merged on Saturday Linux 5.15 no longer calls Jensen as "BROKEN" outright.

• At least from an outside perspective, Ubuntu is Canonical's thing

  It's true that Ubuntu has a community of people who contribute to it despite Canonical not paying them for their time and work. But this community doesn't get to make real decisions on anything that Canonical cares about, any more than the CentOS (community) board gets to overrule IBM's views on how CentOS should operate. If and when Canonical says 'Ubuntu is doing X' (or 'not doing X'), that's what happens. In a way, there's nothing particularly nefarious about this in the case of Ubuntu; Canonical founded it and has always paid for it and run it, and we've just enjoyed the ride.

• Technology Roadmap

  Much like any other organization navigating the future during very uncertain times, the FreeBSD Foundation team spent the last year increasingly focused on how best to support its mission and goal – how best to support the FreeBSD Project. We held strategy sessions with the Foundation Board and FreeBSD Core team, reviewed the results of the FreeBSD core team’s user and developer surveys, and held conversations with developers, users and other members of the FreeBSD community to determine where to focus our efforts. The overall goal is to expand and enhance the efforts of the technology team.

  The beginnings of this effort can be seen in the FreeBSD Quarterly Status Reports for the first half of the year. One example is the sponsored Linuxulator Compatibility Improvements project that included modernizing the code base to support popular client-facing and server related Linux applications. You can read more about his work at https://freebsdfoundation.org/project/targeted-linuxulator-compatibility-improvements/.

• China to push RISC-V to global prominence – but maybe into a corner, too, says analyst

  Attempts to restrict technology transfer to China could see the RISC-V architecture become more prominent, but also reduce the diversity of development around the platform. So says analyst firm Counterpoint Research, which on Monday noted that Arm today owns more than a third of the market for semiconductor IP and is well placed as that market enjoys 11 per cent compound annual growth to reach $8.6bn per year by 2025. But Arm won't have things entirely its own way. "The rise of RISC-V cannot be ignored," Counterpoint stated. "In fact, RISC-V is now a rising star in the industry, largely due to its open-source advantage, better power consumption performance promise [and] reliable security functions."

• New release of SweRVolf RISC-V SoC project aims for lower barrier to entry

  The SweRVolf project, a fully open system-on-chip designed as a reference platform for Western Digital's RISC-V SweRV cores, has announced a major new release promising lower barriers to entry for those looking to experiment. "Western Digital released the first of the SweRV cores, EH1, in 2018," Olof Kindgren, senior digital design engineer at Qamcom and director at the Free and Open Source Silicon (FOSSi) Foundation, told The Register. "While it was an amazing core, and the fastest 32-bit RISC-V core at least at that time, they were new to the world of open-source silicon and asked me what they should do to make it easier for others to pick it up.

• Mobile Linux distributions

  This is a list of GNU/Linux distributions designed to run on smartphones. While many support phones designed to run a mainline Linux kernel including the PinePhone and Librem 5, there are others that are able to run on phones that originally shipped with Android thanks to tools like Halium that allow them to use Linux kernels provided by makers of those Android phones. Keep in mind that many of the operating systems listed below operating systems are a work in progress and may not be as stable or speedy as Android, may not support all of a phone’s hardware, and may not be able to run as many mobile-friendly applications. But most have at least a working web browser, which enables you to run web applications. Some allow you to run Android apps in a container thanks to tools like Anbox. And many will let you run desktop Linux applications, even if they don’t scale well to phone-sized screens. If you connect a keyboard, mouse, and display, you can even use your phone as a tiny desktop computer.

• Huawei Launches Industrial Operating System for Coal Mines - Caixin Global

  HarmonyOS-based software replaces grab bag of Linux, Unix and Windows systems and promises greater efficiency and safety in mining

• Oracle to PostgreSQL? 6 Reasons to Make Your Open Source Migration

  Now with nearly three-decades of maturity, the post-object relational database system PostgreSQL is particularly emblematic of an enterprise-wide trend: proven open source data technologies – in their pure open source versions – are increasingly replacing expensive and inflexible proprietary solutions. Postgres offers some especially enticing advantages for enterprises looking to trim (if not downright slash) costs without impacting database performance. Here’s a half-dozen reasons enterprises should consider the fully open source version of Postgres as a more-than-capable Oracle replacement.

• Creating Successful R User Groups in Abuja, Nigeria

  Bilikisu Aderinto, Founder/Organizer of the Abuja R User Group and R-Ladies Abuja, talks about the lack of R User groups in her area, and her desire to start one, leading to a large increase in members in Abuja. She talks about the issues with income disparity and how it affected lockdown attendance for the group. She also talks about training others to increase their knowledge base in the area.

Programming Leftovers

• Python in 2021: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

  In this post, I want to look at the biggest strengths and weaknesses of Python, with more emphasis on the weaknesses, just because these problems have been there for years now and some of the rough edges bleed a lot.

• GitLab files to go public as both revenue and losses surge

  GitLab Inc., which provides a cloud service to enable software developers to share code and collaborate on projects, today announced plans to go public with an initial offering of stock.

  The San Francisco-based company, which counts among its competitors Microsoft Corp.-owned GitHub and Atlassian Corp. PLC’s BitBucket, didn’t reveal yet how much it plans to raise or precisely when it will do the IPO. It was last valued at $6 billion after a secondary share sale in January, and has raised a total of $400 million from investors such as Khosla Ventures, Altimeter Capital, TCV, Franklin Templeton and Coatue Management.

• [Old] LLVM internals, part 1: the bitcode format

  I’ve done a couple of posts on LLVM itself, mostly on things you can do with LLVM or how LLVM represents particular program features.

  I’ve received some good feedback on these, but I’d like to focus a sub-series of posts on LLVM’s implementation itself: the file formats, parsing strategies, and algorithmic choices underlying LLVM’s public interfaces (APIs, CLIs, and consumable output files). I’ll be writing these posts as I work on a series of pure-Rust libraries for ingesting LLVM’s intermediate representation, with the end goal of being able to perform read-only analyses of programs compiled to LLVM IR in pure Rust.

  For those who don’t know what LLVM is, this post has a broader background on LLVM’s components and intermediate representation.

• [Old] LLVM internals, part 2: parsing the bitstream

  In the last post, I performed a high-level overview of LLVM’s bitcode format (and underlying bitstream container representation). The end result of that post was a release announcement for llvm-bitcursor, which provides the critical first abstraction(s) for a pure-Rust bitcode parser.

  This post will be a more concrete walkthrough of the process of parsing actual LLVM bitstreams, motivated by another release announcement: llvm-bitstream.

  Put together, the llvm-bitcursor and llvm-bitstream crates get us two thirds-ish of the way to a pure-Rust parser for LLVM IR. The only remaining major component is a “mapper” from the block and record representations in the bitstream to actual IR-level representations (corresponding to llvm::Module, llvm::Function, &c in the official C++ API).

• LLVM internals, part 3: from bitcode to IR

  This post marks a turning point: now that we have reasonable abstractions for the bitstream container itself, we can focus on mapping it into a form that resembles LLVM’s IR. We’ll cover some of the critical steps in that process1 below, introducing a new crate (llvm-mapper) in the process.

  Also, critically: this post is the first in the series where our approach to parsing and interpreting LLVM’s bitcode differs significantly from how LLVM’s own codebase does things. The details of the post should still be interesting to anyone who wants to learn the details of how an IR-level LLVM module is constructed, but will not reflect how LLVM itself does that construction2.

Proprietary Software and Security Leftovers

• Report: Biden administration to roll out sanctions targeting ransomware payments [iophk: Windows TCO]

  The sources believe that the sanctions could be implemented as early as next week by the U.S. Treasury Department. The sanctions are expected to be imposed on “specific targets” rather than the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. Additionally, the Treasury Department is reportedly preparing to release new guidance that will warn businesses they could face fines and other penalties over involvement in ransomware payments.

• U.S. to Target Crypto Ransomware Payments With Sanctions [iophk: Windows TCO]

  The Treasury Department plans to impose the sanctions as soon as next week, the people said, and will issue fresh guidance to businesses on the risks associated with facilitating ransomware payments, including fines and other penalties. Later this year, expected new anti-money-laundering and terror-finance rules will seek to limit the use of cryptocurrency as a payment mechanism in ransomware attacks and other illicit activities.

  The actions collectively would represent the most significant attempt yet by the Biden administration to undercut the digital finance ecosystem of traders, exchanges and other elements that cybersecurity experts say has allowed debilitating ransomware attacks to flourish in recent years.

• PrintNightmare Windows Patch Reportedly Breaks Network Printing Altogether

  What makes the problem worse is that Windows is reporting different types of errors to each user, making it a bit harder to see what's going on. BleepingComputer said that one source is seeing a 4098 Warning in the application event logs, while another said that their printer port tabs were all blank. One source couldn't even get access to their network printers at all, seeing "access denied" errors instead.

• Buying an iPhone 13 represents 49 days of work for Mexican professional

  An average Mexican professional has to work almost 50 days to afford the latest edition of Apple’s iPhone, an analysis by an international e-commerce platform found.

• Why Government and Military Sites Are Hosting Porn and Viagra Ads

  The source of at least some of these uploads is a company called Laserfiche, according to Edwards. Laserfiche is a government software provider that makes content management systems. The company has contracts with the Army, the Navy, the FBI, and more, according to public procurement records.

• ‘OMIGOD’ vulnerabilities put Azure customers at risk

  The flaws were reported Tuesday by cloud security vendor Wiz, which previously disclosed the ChaosDB Azure vulnerability last month. At the center is Open Management Infrastructure (OMI), an open source software sponsored by Microsoft that Wiz researcher Nir Ohfeld described in a blog post as essentially "Windows Management Infrastructure (WMI) for Unix/Linux systems."

• Microsoft Azure Users with Linux VMs Exposed to Security Vulnerabiltiy Called OMIGOD—How to Fix | Tech Times

  It is worth noting that Wiz was able to dig a total of four security vulnerabilities in the OMI project of Microsoft. The security company dubbed these flaws as OMIGOD to give it a catchy nickname.

• Microsoft's end-of-summer software security cleanse crushes more than 80 bugs

  For its September Patch Tuesday, Microsoft churned out fixes for 66 vulnerabilities alongside 20 Chromium security bugs in Microsoft Edge.

• This US company sold iPhone [cracking] tools to UAE spies

  Documents filed by the US Justice Department on Tuesday detail how the sale was facilitated by a group of American mercenaries working for Abu Dhabi, without legal permission from Washington to do so. But the case documents do not reveal who sold the powerful iPhone exploit to the Emiratis.

• 10 Best Browsers for Privacy That Aren’t Google Chrome [Ed: This list is pure comedy in some places. Privacy? Not even close…]

  In this era of hacking, identity theft, data privacy violations, and Facebook watching your every move, the best browser for privacy can be your greatest weapon. The internet can be the place to be completely anonymous, but it’s also where you can be the most vulnerable. Data is one of the most monetized assets right now. And where do you get most of the people’s data? On the internet— unguarded and sometimes given voluntarily. Google Chrome is one of the major tech companies that sell their user’s data, and it’s the most used browser in the world. So, if you want to keep your data private and still want to continue your internet browsing, it’s time to make the move, and choose a secure browser. In this quick guide, we have compiled the best browsers for privacy that are perfect Google Chrome alternatives.