Andrey S. unix-junkie

FAQ on the xz-utils backdoor (CVE-2024-3094)

This is a living document. Everything in this document is made in good faith of being accurate, but like I just said; we don't yet know everything about what's going on.

Update: I've disabled comments as of 2025-01-26 to avoid everyone having notifications for something a year on if someone wants to suggest a correction. Folks are free to email to suggest corrections still, of course.

Background

Because cross-compiling binaries for Windows is easier than building natively

I want Microsoft to do better, want Windows to be a decent development platform-and yet, I constantly see Microsoft playing the open source game: advertising how open-source and developer friendly they are - only to crush developers under the heel of the corporate behemoth's boot.

The people who work at Microsoft are amazing, kind, talented individuals. This is aimed at the company's leadership, who I feel has on many occassions crushed myself and other developers under. It's a plea for help.

The source of truth for the 'open source' C#, C++, Rust, and other Windows SDKs is proprietary

You probably haven't heard of it before, but if you've ever used win32 API bindings in C#, C++, Rust, or other languages, odds are they were generated from a repository called microsoft/win32metadata.

Think twice before abandoning X11. Wayland breaks everything!

tl;dr: Wayland is not "the future", it is merely an incompatible alternative to the established standard with a different set of priorities and goals.

Wayland breaks everything! It is binary incompatible, provides no clear transition path with 1:1 replacements for everything in X11, and is even philosophically incompatible with X11. Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to "just work" without the need for adjustments, then you may be better off avoiding Wayland.

Wayland solves no issues I have but breaks almost everything I need. Even the most basic, most simple things (like xkill) - in this case with no obvious replacement. And usually it stays broken, because the Wayland folks mostly seem to care about Automotive, Gnome, maybe KDE - and alienating e

Hyperlinks (a.k.a. HTML-like anchors) in terminal emulators

[ Update 2025-03-24: Commenting is disabled permanently. Previous comments are archived at web.archive.org. ]

Most of the terminal emulators auto-detect when a URL appears onscreen and allow to conveniently open them (e.g. via Ctrl+click or Cmd+click, or the right click menu).

It was, however, not possible until now for arbitrary text to point to URLs, just as on webpages.

Use curl to get the JSON response for the latest release
Use grep to find the line containing file URL
Use cut and tr to extract the URL
Use wget to download it

curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/jgm/pandoc/releases/latest \
| grep "browser_download_url.*deb" \
| cut -d : -f 2,3 \
| tr -d \" \

	"
	" .vimrc
	"
	" vim:ft=vim
	"

	" Windows-specific defaults
	if (has("win32") \|\| has("win16"))
	if filereadable(expand("$VIM/_vimrc"))
	source $VIM/_vimrc

	package ch.claude_martin;

	import java.util.function.Function;
	import java.util.function.UnaryOperator;

	public class YComb {

	interface Fn2Op<T> extends Function<Fn2Op<T>, UnaryOperator<T>> {
	@Override
	UnaryOperator<T> apply(Fn2Op<T> x);

	ERROR: java.sql.SQLException: The server time zone value 'EEST' is unrecognized or represents more than one time zone. You must configure either the server or JDBC driver (via the serverTimezone configuration property) to use a more specifc time zone value if you want to utilize time zone support.


	SOLVE:
	1. sudo nano /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf
	2. add after line [mysqld]
	default_time_zone='+03:00'
	3. ctrl+o
	4. ctrl+x
	5. sudo service mysql restart

	/*<?php
	///public class PhpJava { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.printf("/%s",
	//\u000A\u002F\u002A
	class PhpJava {
	static function main() {
	echo(//\u000A\u002A\u002F
	"Hello World!");
	}}
	//\u000A\u002F\u002A
	PhpJava::main();

	body {
	background-image:
	linear-gradient(45deg, #ccc 25%, transparent 25%),
	linear-gradient(135deg, #ccc 25%, transparent 25%),
	linear-gradient(45deg, transparent 75%, #ccc 75%),
	linear-gradient(135deg, transparent 75%, #ccc 75%);
	background-size:25px 25px; /* Must be a square */
	background-position:0 0, 12.5px 0, 12.5px -12.5px, 0px 12.5px; /* Must be half of one side of the square */
	}