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Submission + - Python Software Foundation refuses $1.5 million grant with anti DEI provision. (blogspot.com) 1

Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program.

"We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”

Comment The vector art 3D rotate tool is super cool (Score 2) 7

I watched the "Project Turntable" video, and that is unbelievably cool.

To work, the AI has to recognize what the drawing represents, figure out how to reverse-transform the 2D representation into a 3D object, and work out what the hidden parts should look like. It's amazing.

It's only a short step between this and working out walk cycles, matching mouth movements to dialogue, adding facial expressions, etc.

This will revolutionize 2D animation.

Comment Re:Modern security products seem to increase... (Score 2) 30

I don't necessarily disagree with where you're going here, but can you elaborate on this:

The whole world has realized that they need to start air-gapping databases

I've worked at government contractors that had real air-gaps for things like their databases, but that does not seem to be the norm for the rest of the world. How would ordinary businesses make use of their databases if they are not network accessible under any circumstances, printed reports? Some sort of unidirectional transmission? What sort of data ingress are they using?

I ask this because I have been involved in the transfer of data in highly regulated, air-gapped systems, and they are incredibly expensive. Are you really indicating that true air-gap databases will be ubiquitous (or at least commonplace) in the forseeable future?

Submission + - Samba gets funding from the German Sovereign Tech Fund.

Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: The Samba project has secured significant funding (€688,800.00) from the German
Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to advance the project. The investment was
successfully applied for by SerNet. Over the next 18 months, Samba developers
from SerNet will tackle 17 key development subprojects aimed at enhancing
Samba’s security, scalability, and functionality.

The Sovereign Tech Fund is a German federal government funding program that
supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital
infrastructure. Their goal is to sustainably strengthen the open source
ecosystem.

The project's focus is on areas like SMB3 Transparent Failover, SMB3 UNIX
extensions, SMB-Direct, Performance and modern security protocols such as SMB
over QUIC. These improvements are designed to ensure that Samba remains a
robust and secure solution for organizations that rely on a sovereign IT
infrastructure. Development work began as early as September the 1st and is
expected to be completed by the end of February 2026 for all sub-projects.

All development will be done in the open following the existing Samba
development process. First gitlab CI pipelines have already been running [4]
and gitlab MRs will appear soon!

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsamba.plus%2Fblog%2Fdetail...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sovereigntechfund....

Comment Re:Maybe (Score 1) 104

The upstream Linux kernel doesn't differentiate between security bugs and "normal" bug fixes. So the new kernel.org CNA just assigns CVE's to all fixes. They don't score them.

Look at the numbers from the whitepaper:

"In March 2024 there were 270 new CVEs created for the stable Linux kernel. So far in April 2024 there are 342 new CVEs:"

Comment Re:Yeah (Score 1) 104

Yes ! That's exactly the point. Trying to curate and select patches for a "frozen" kernel fails due to the firehose of fixes going in upstream.

And in the kernel many of these could be security bugs. No one is doing evaluation on that, there are simply too many fixes in such a complex code base to check.

Comment Re:Maybe (Score 1) 104

You're missing something.

New bugs are discovered upstream, but the vendor kernel maintainers either aren't tracking, or are being discouraged from putting these back into the "frozen" kernel.

We even discovered one case where a RHEL maintainer fixed a bug upstream, but then neglected to apply it to the vulnerable vendor kernel. So it isn't like they didn't know about the bug. Maybe they just didn't check the vendor kernel was vulnerable.

I'm guessing management policy discouraged such things. It's easier to just ignore such bugs if customer haven't noticed.

Submission + - Why a 'frozen' distribution Linux kernel isn't the safest choice for security (zdnet.com) 1

Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: Cracks in the Ice: Why a 'frozen' distribution Linux kernel isn't the safest choice for security

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fciq.com%2Fblog%2Fwhy-a-fro...

This is an executive summary of research that my colleagues Ronnie Sahlberg and Jonathan Maple did, published as a whitepaper with all the numeric details here:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fciq.com%2Fwhitepaper%2Fven...

Steven Vaughan-Nichols is covering the release of this
data here:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zdnet.com%2Farticle%2F...

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