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On commercial forks of FOSS projects
The gaming and live streaming industry is a lucrative and rapidly growing commercial sector with a unique understanding of copyright and intellectual property, and many parties with conflicting interests and access to different economic resources.
The understanding of intellectual property among gamers and the companies which serve them differs substantailly from that of free software, and literacy in the values and philosophy of free software among this community is very low. It is then of little surprise that we see abuse of free software from this community, namely in the recent (and illegal) commercial forks of a popular FOSS streaming platform called OBS Studio by companies like TikTok.
These forks...
Status update, December 2021
Greetings! It has been a cold and wet month here in Amsterdam, much like the rest of them, as another period of FOSS progress rolls on by. I have been taking it a little bit easier this month, and may continue to take some time off in the coming weeks, so I can have a bit of a rest for the holidays. However, I do have some progress to report, so let’s get to it.
In programming language progress, we’ve continued to see improvement in cryptography, with more AES cipher modes and initial work on AES-NI support for Intel processors, as well as support for HMAC and...
Impressions of Linux Mint & elementary OS
In a recent post, I spoke about some things that Linux distros need to do better to accommodate end-users. I was reminded that there are some Linux distros which are, at least to some extent, following my recommended playbook, and have been re-evaluating two of them over the past couple of weeks: Linux Mint and elementary OS. I installed these on one of my laptops and used it as my daily driver for a day or two each.
Both of these distributions are similar in a few ways. For one, both distros required zero printer configuration: it just worked. I was very impressed with this. Both distros are...
Stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability in UDP packet handling in Toxcore (CVE-2021-44847)
A stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability was discovered in Toxcore’s networking code that allows a remote attacker to crash the Toxcore process or potentially execute arbitrary code by sending a specially crafted packet. The vulnerability was assigned CVE-2021-44847 identifier.
All users of Toxcore that don’t have UDP disabled are affected. An attacker, knowing the target’s DHT public key, IP and port, can easily craft a packet exploiting the vulnerability. DHT public key, IP and port are all public information, publicly available on the DHT, so an attacker can target any and all Toxcore users by scraping this information from the DHT. This...
What desktop Linux needs to succeed in the mainstream
The Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel has been putting out a series of videos called the Switching to Linux Challenge that has been causing a bit of a stir in the Linux community. I’ve been keeping an eye on these developments, and thought it was a good time to weigh in with my thoughts. This article focuses on what Linux needs to do better — I have also written a companion article, “How new Linux users can increase their odds of success”, which looks at the other side of the problem.
Linux is not accessible to the average user today, and I didn’t need to watch these videos...
How new Linux users can increase their odds of success
The Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel has been putting out a series of videos called the Switching to Linux Challenge that has been causing a bit of a stir in the Linux community. I’ve been keeping an eye on these developments, and thought it was a good time to weigh in with my thoughts. This article focuses on how new Linux users can increase their odds for success — I have also written a companion article, “What desktop Linux needs to succeed in the mainstream”, which looks at the other side of the problem.
Linux is, strictly speaking, an operating system kernel, which is a small component of...
postmarketOS revolutionizes smartphone hacking
I briefly mentioned postmarketOS in my Pinephone review two years ago, but after getting my Dutch SIM card set up in my Pinephone and having another go at using postmarketOS, I reckon they deserve special attention.
Let’s first consider the kind of ecosystem into which postmarketOS emerged: smartphone hacking in the XDA Forums era. This era was dominated by amateur hackers working independently for personal prestige, with little to no regard for the values of free software or collaboration. It was common to see hacked-together binary images shipped behind adfly links in XDA forum threads in blatant disregard of the GPL, with pages and pages of users asking...