cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions


red alert klaxons, or something else from a star trek sound bank like this


But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago.
Of course rewriting them will introduce some new issues, but it will also eliminate classes of bugs from which there are definitely still a great many in old “stable” C code (bugs which are now being discovered and will presumably continue to be discovered at a much faster pace due to LLMs).
The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse.
I don’t think it is just an excuse; I believe that improving security is also a goal… but removing GPL code is clearly also part of their motivation :(


No, it is not a good time. A project like Ubuntu should now be in freeze as they had about 3 months before release

This bug was reported (and resolved by rolling back to the GNU coreutils version of cp) on June 30, a little over 15 weeks prior to the scheduled release date.
Which distros have a feature freeze that far in advance?
Ubuntu hasn’t even scheduled theirs for this release yet; if you edit that url to look at previous releases’ schedules you can see their feature freeze and debian import freezes are typically about 2 months prior to release. (See here for descriptions of all of the different types of freezes…)


What an absolute shitshow
I’d say the month of June is actually a good time to be breaking and fixing things in a release that is due to come out in (checks notes) October.


TIL :(
I’ve updated the post to link to the wikipedia article; I probably would not have posted this if I had seen that first :/
It’s odd that the petapixel article doesn’t mention he’s a nazi or that his identity was unknown for nearly 30 years after the incident as wikipedia says; it instead implies he was already known for other things by saying he “starred in theater productions and television shows” 🤔





that 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.)


twitter (via cloudflare) is serving HTTP 403 {"error_code":2,"error_response":"Dmcaed"}


Wait until you hear about the Alderney pound, Manx pound, Jersey pound, Guernsey pound, Falkland Islands pound, Gibraltar pound, Saint Helena pound, …
from wikipedia:
Throughout the UK, £1 and £2 coins are legal tender for any amount, with the other coins being legal tender only for limited amounts. Bank of England notes are legal tender for any amount in England and Wales, but not in Scotland or Northern Ireland.
[…]
Bank of England, Scottish, Northern Irish, Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Gibraltar, and Falkland banknotes may be offered anywhere in the UK, although there is no obligation to accept them as a means of payment, and acceptance varies. For example, merchants in England generally accept Scottish and Northern Irish notes, but some unfamiliar with them may reject them.[142] However, Scottish and Northern Irish notes both tend to be accepted in Scotland and Northern Ireland, respectively. Merchants in England generally do not accept Jersey, Guernsey, Manx, Gibraltarian, and Falkland notes but Manx notes are generally accepted in Northern Ireland.[143] Bank of England notes are generally accepted in the Falklands and Gibraltar, but for example, Scottish and Northern Irish notes are not.[144] Since all of the notes are denominated in sterling, banks will exchange them for locally issued notes at face value,[145][failed verification] though some in the UK have had trouble exchanging Falkland Islands notes.[146]
iirc the Linux kernel dropped support for pre-Pentium x86 in the last few years, so any distro with 486 support now would be using an unmaintained kernel.
I think if you want a maintained operating system for your 486 today, NetBSD is probably the thing to run.