fidzu : geek

"OpenAI has published a new National Community Compact and Compute Campus Policy Blueprint, apparently in response to the Blue Wave Midterm Elections," writes ancient Slashdot reader Gilmoure. "Instead of moving into communities like a juggernaut, they say they will be dangling friendly carrots going forward." Here's an excerpt from OpenAI's article: Every future compute campus OpenAI owns and operates will have its own local compact. We'll engage residents early enough to ensure their input shapes project plans, give them a local point of contact throughout the life of the campus, and report publicly each year on how we're doing. Each compact will reflect local priorities and include a common set of commitments: - Pay our own way on energy and infrastructure. We'll pay the full cost of the electricity we use and the infrastructure needed to serve us. Before major spending begins, we'll provide financial assurances so other customers are protected if a project is delayed, reduced, or canceled. - Protect local resources and report on our impact. We'll develop a water plan for each campus, prioritize closed-loop or low-water cooling, and publish site-level water and electricity use. We'll publish construction plans and independent noise studies before operations begin and annually afterward. And we will not use non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with public officials, allowing only narrow protections covering legitimate security information, trade secrets, or proprietary or competitively sensitive information. - Create opportunities for local workers and businesses. We'll publish the jobs we expect to create, work with unions and training providers to help residents prepare for them, and report annually on hiring and apprenticeships. We'll also make sustained investments in priorities residents help select. [...] The investments that help America compete globally can also help communities prosper locally. That starts with giving residents a say while plans can still change and a way to hold developers accountable for delivering on their commitments. That's what we're committing to at the campuses we own and operate, and what we believe people should be able to count on wherever AI infrastructure is built across the country.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 Nov 2026 11:00pm GMT

A newly disclosed OpenSSH flaw dubbed "*sshole" can allow attackers to log in to password-disabled accounts on certain musl-based Linux systems simply by submitting a password longer than 256 bytes. "Apparently certain varieties of musl Linux (Alpine, OpenWrt, Buildroot, Yocto, etc.) have had this OpenSSH vulnerability for about a decade," writes longtime Slashdot reader AlteredEgg. "Upgrade now!" BleepingComputer reports: Security researcher Ozgun Kultekin, who discovered and released details on the vulnerability today, says the flaw has existed since 2016 and stems from how OpenSSH handles password verification errors on systems using the musl C library. Linux accounts can be configured to prevent password logins by replacing their password hash with an asterisk (*) in the /etc/shadow file. Because this is not a valid password hash, no password should allow access to those accounts. However, a patch introduced in OpenSSH in 2016 to fix a username enumeration vulnerability tracked as CVE-2016-6210 changed how OpenSSH handled accounts without usable password hashes. To prevent attackers from identifying valid usernames through different response times, OpenSSH was modified to perform password hashing even when an account had no usable password hash, including accounts configured with * to block password logins. The problem is that the musl C library's crypt() function also returns * when password hashing fails, including when a submitted password exceeds its 256-byte limit. This means an attacker can submit an oversized password and cause OpenSSH to compare the returned * against the account's stored *, resulting in a successful login. To be clear, the flaw does not allow attackers to bypass passwords on accounts with valid password hashes. [...] Admins who can't immediately install the update can mitigate the issue by turning off SSH password authentication with PasswordAuthentication no in their SSH server configuration and restarting SSH. Kultekin says admins can also check for signs of exploitation by examining SSH authentication logs for password-based logins for accounts that should not allow them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 Nov 2026 10:00pm GMT

Orange ear cushions included.

05 Nov 2026 9:56pm GMT

Google is technically offering schools more choice but not the choices anyone wants.

05 Nov 2026 9:40pm GMT

Bitter energy drinks turned out to be ChatGPT-steered poisoning, lawsuit says.

05 Nov 2026 9:39pm GMT

According to Bloomberg, Apple is cutting employee AI spending limits to reduce costs, lowering some engineers from $300 to $200 per day and considering limits as low as $100, with some teams capped at $25. Employees are also being encouraged to use cheaper models or on-device AI. MacRumors reports: Engineers at Apple have the largest budgets because using AI for coding can consume a large number of tokens. Apple lets employees use Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other models. Some Apple employees told Bloomberg that few were using their full $300 daily limit, so the savings may be small. Apple has also hired outside productivity consultants for some divisions. Combined with the AI cost cuts, the reviews have fueled worries about possible restructuring.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 Nov 2026 9:00pm GMT

Ubuntu has been at the forefront of replacing the traditional versions of basic tools like sudo with replacements written in Rust, but aside from worries about replacing battle-tested code with brand new, relatively untested code, there's new things to worry about it. As it turns out, sudo-rs, the Rust replacement for sudo, is intentionally incompatible with the classic version in dangerous ways, as Chris Siebenmann discovered to his dismay. Basically, the classic sudo supports the use of wildcards defined using square brackets, so that if you allow a user to run, say, /usr/sbin/exim -bp, without a password, they can run exim -bpa, exim -bpc, exim -bpr, or exim -bpu without having to supply a password. This allows for very specific, fine-grained access control, which is quite a nice capability to have if you're managing many systems and users. Sadly, sudo-rs intentionally does not support this, opting to only allow you to use the generic * wildcard. Worse yet, it doesn't really make this clear, either. ↫ Chris Siebenmann I do not really have words for this. The Rust sudo has apparently opted to keep the single most dangerous wildcard while disallowing all of the wildcards that allow one to be narrow and specific about what you're allowing, and it buries this at the end of a section that devotes a bunch of words to describing functionality it doesn't have and doesn't support, with absolutely nothing else in that section to say this (either up front or in the descriptions of how all the wildcards would work if sudo-rs supported them, which it doesn't). If you're going to replace such vital, core tools like sudo that god knows how many people rely on every single day, you better be damn sure you're feature-complete and can act as a drop-in replacement. If someone switches from sudo to doas, nobody expects the experience to be identical. However, if you're consistently being told that sudo-rs is a drop-in replacement and you shouldn't expect any disruptions, you better be able to make true on that promise. Ubuntu isn't some also-ran small hobby distribution, and its developers should act like it. What a clown show.

05 Nov 2026 4:24pm GMT

The second desktop environment release I've got for you today is LXQt 2.5.0. This new version excises its last LXDE dependency, and QTerminal and QTermWidget received considerable improvements, like new background image modes, a visual bell, support for OSC-8 hyperlinks, and more. There's a ton of smaller changes and improvements as well, but do note that due to a bug, 2.5.0 broke LXQt's Monitor Settings on X11. The project intends to fix this as quickly as possible and push a point release to address this issue.

05 Nov 2026 4:03pm GMT

It's desktop environment Thursday, as I've got two new releases for you today. First, Cinnamon, the desktop environment primarily associated with Linux Mint, has hit version 6.8. This version will officially ship with Linux Mint 27, scheduled for around Christmas of this year. Highlights of Cinnamon 6.8 include hibernation support via a Suspend action in the main menu, modern one-to-one trackpad gestures for both Wayland and Xorg sessions, support for the oo7 Secret Service provider, support for multiple instances in the Sound applet, and a more unified Network applet that merges the WireGuard and VPN sections. ↫ Marcus Nestor at 9To5Linux While Cinnamon is first and foremost a Linux Mint project, it's available on countless other distributions as well, including dedicated variants for popular distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu. Its Wayland support is finally materialising too, which is long overdue.

05 Nov 2026 3:57pm GMT

This is a story of how we got from something like this: Failed to deserialize BUILDINFO file: Parser failed with the following error: unknown ^ invalid makepkg build environment option expected `buildflags`, `ccache`, `check`, `color`, `distcc`, `sign`, `makeflags` To this: When the ALPM project started, the goal was fairly simple: Better tooling to interact with the low-level plumbing of Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM). This meant binaries to read/write individual file types, better error messages, extensive specifications and of course exports to common dataformats like JSON. The thing is, although some of us already had experience with low-level dataframe parsing, …

08 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT