after looking at the ticket myself i think the relevant things IMHO are:

• a person filed a bug report due to not seeing what changes in the new version caused a different behaviour
• that person seemed pushy, first telling the dev where patches should be sent to (is this normal? i guess not, better let the dev decide where patches go or -in this case- if patches are needed at all), then coming up with ceo style wordings (highly visible, customer experience of untested but nevertheless released to live product is bad due to this (implicitly “your”) bug)
• pushiness is counterparted by “please help”
• free-of-charge consulting was given by the one pointing to changes likely beeing visible in changelog (i did not look though) but nevertheless it was pointed out to the parameter which assumes RTFM (if docs were indeed updated) that a default value had changed and its behavior could be adjusted by using that given parameter.

up to there that person -belonging to M$ or not (don’t know and don’t care) - behaved IMHO rather correctly, submitting a bug report for something that looked like it, beeing a bit pushy, wanting priority, trying to command, but still formally at least “asking” for help. but at that point the “bug” seemed to have been resolved to me, it looks like the person was either not reading the manual and changelog, or maybe manual or changelog lacks that information, but that was not stated later so i guess that person just did not read neither changelog nor manual.

instead - so it seems to me - that person demanded immediate and free-of-charge consulting of how exactly the switch should be used to work in that specific use case which would imply the dev looks into the example files, maybe try and error for himself just so that that person does not need to neither invest the time to learn use the software the company depends on, nor hire a consultant to do the work.

i think (intentional or not) abusing a bug tracker for demanding free-of-charge enduser consulting by a dev is a bad idea unless one wants(!) to actively waste the precious time of the dev (that high priority ticket for the highly visible already live released product relies on) or has even worse intentions like:

• uploading example files with exploits in them, pointing to the exact versions that include the RCE vulnerability that sample file would abuse and the “bug” was just reported cause it fits the version needed for exploitation and pressure was made by naming big companies to maybe make the dev run a vulnerable version on it on his workstation before someone finds out, so that an upstream attack could take place directly on the devs workstation. but thats just creating a fictive worst case scenario.

to me this clearly looks like a “different culture” problem. in companies where all are paid from basically the same employer, abusing an internal bug tracker for quick internal consulting would probably be seen as just normal and best practice because the dev who knows and is actually working on the code is likely to have the solution right at hand without thinking much while the other person, who is in charge of quick fixing an untested but already live to customers released product, does not have sufficient knowledge of how the thing works and neither is given the time to learn or at least read changelogs and manual nor the time to learn the basics of general upstream software culture.

in companies the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle could be a problem that imho likely leads to such situations, but this is a guess as i know nobody working there and i am not convinced that that person is in fact working for the named company, instead in that ticket shows up a name that i would assume to be a reason to not rely too much about names in the tickes system always be realnames.

the behaviour that causes the bad postings here in this lemmy thread is to me likely “just” a culture problem and that person would be advised well if told to learn to know the open source culture, netiquette etc and learn to behave differently depending on to who, where and how they communicate with, what to expect and how to interact productively to the benefit of their upstream too, which is the “real price” all so often in open source. it could be that in the company that rolled out the untested product it is seen to be best practice to immediately grab the dev who knows a software and let him help you with whatever you can’t on your own (for whatever reason) whenever you manage to encounter one =]

i assume the pushyness could likely come from their hierarchy. it is not uncommon that so called leaders just create pressure to below because they maybe have no clue of the thing and not want to gain that clue, but that i cannot know, its just a picture in my head. but in a company that seems to put pressure on releasing an untested product to customers i guess i am not too wrong with the direction of that assumption. what the company maybe should learn is that releasing untested and/or unfinished products to live is a bad habit. but i also assume that if they wanted to learn that, they maybe would have started to learn it like roundabout 2 decades ago. again, i do not know for what company that person works -or worked- for, could be just a subcontractor of the named one too. and also could be that the pushyness (telling its for m$, that its live, has impact to customers etc) was really decided by someone up the latter who would have literally no experience at all on how to handle upstream in such situations. hierarchies can be very dysfunctional sometimes and in companies saying “impact to customers” sometimes is likely the same as saying “boss says asap”.

what i would suggest their customers (those who were given a beta version as production ready) should learn is that when someone (maybe) continously delivers differently than advertised, that after some few times of experiencing this, the customer would be insane when assuming that that bad behaviour would vanish by pure hope + throwing money into hands where money maybe already didn’t help improving their habits for assumingly decades. And when feeding everhungry with money does not resolve the problems, that maybe looking towards those who do have a non-money-dependant grown-up culture could actually provide more really usable products. Evaluation of new solutions (which one would really be best for a specific usecase i.e.) or testing new versions before really rolling them out to live might be costly especially when done throughout, but can provide a lot of really high valueable stability otherwise unreachable by those who only throw money at shareholders of brands and maybe rely on pure hope for all of the rest. Especially when that brand maybe even officially anounced to remove their testing department ;+) what should a sane and educated customer expect then ? but again to note, i do not know which companies really are involved and how exactly. from the ticket i do not see which company that person directly works for, nor if the claim that m$ is involved is a fact or just a false claim in hope for quicker help (companies already too desperate to test products before live could be desperate again in need for even more help when their bad habits piled up too long and begin falling on their heads)

the xz vulnerability was done through a superflous dependency to systemd, xz was only the library that was abused to use systemd’s superflous dependency hell. sshd does not use xz, but systemd does depend on it. sshd does not need systemd, but it was attacked through its library dependency.

we should remove any pointless dependencies that can be found on a system to prevent such attacks in future by reducing dependency based attack vectors to a minimum.

also we should increase the overall level of privilege separation where systemd is a good bad example, just look at the init binary and its capability zoo.

The company who hired “the” systemd developer should IMHO start to really fix these issues !

so please hold your “$they have fixed it” back until the the root cause that made the xz dependency level attack possible in the first place has been really fixed =)

Of course pointing it out was good, but now the root cause should be fixed, not just a random symptom that happened to be the first visible atrack that used this attack vector introduced by systemd.

looking at the official timeline it is not completely a microsoft product, but…

1. microsoft hated all of linux/open source for ages, even publicly called it a cancer etc.
2. microsoft suddenly stopped it’s hatespeech after the long-term “ineffectivenes” (as in not destroying) of its actions against the open source world became obvious by time
3. systemd appeared on stage
4. everything within systemd is microsoft style, journald is literally microsoft logging, how services are “managed” started etc is exactly the flawed microsoft service management, how systemd was pushed to distributions is similar to how microsoft pushes things to its victi… eh… “custumers”, systemd breaks its promises like microsoft does (i.e. it has never been a drop-in-replacement, like microsoft claimed its OS to be secure while making actual use of separation of users from admins i.e. by filesystem permissions first “really” in 2007 with the need of an extra click, where unix already used permissions for such protection in 1973), systemd causes chaos and removes the deterministic behaviour from linux distributions (i.e. before systemd windows was the only operating system that would show different errors at different times during installtion on the very same perfectly working hardware, now on systemd distros similar chaos can be observed too). there AFAIK still does not exist a definition of the 'binary" protocol of journald, every normal open source project would have done that official definition in the first place, systemd developers statement was like “we take care for it, just use our libraries” wich is microsoft style saying “use our products”, the superflous systems features do harm more than they help (journald’s “protection” from log flooding use like 50% cpu cycles for huge amount of wanted and normal logs while a sane logging system would be happily only using 3%cpu for the very same amount of logs/second whilst ‘not’ throwing away single log lines like journald, thus journald exhaustively and pointlessly abuses system resources for features that do more harm where they are said to help with in the first place), making the init process a network reachable service looks to me like as bad as microsoft once put its web rendering enginge (iis) into kernelspace to be a bit faster but still beeing slower than apache while adding insecurity that later was an abused attack vector. systemd adding pointless dependencies all along the way like microsoft does with its official products to put some force on its customers for whatever official reason they like best. systemd beeing pushed to distributions with a lot of force and damage even to distributions that had this type of freedom of choice to NOT force their users to use a specific init system in its very roots (and the push to place systemd inside of those distros even was pushed furzher to circumvent the unstable->testing->stable rules like microsoft does with its patches i.e.), this list is very far from complete and still no end is in sight.
5. “the” systemd developer is finally officially hired by microsoft

i said that systemd was a microsoft product long before its developer was then hired by microsoft in 2022. And even if he wasn’t hired by them, systemd is still a microsoft-style product in every important way with all what is wrong in how microsoft does things wrong, beginning with design flaws, added insecurities and unneeded attack vectors, added performance issues, false promises, usage bugs (like i’ve never seen an already just logged in user to be directly be logged off in a linux system, except for when systemd wants to stop-start something in background because of it’s ‘fk y’ and where one would 'just try to login again and dont think about it" like with any other of microsofts shitware), ending in insecure and instable systems where one has to “hope” that “the providers” will take care for it without continueing to add even more superflous features, attack vectors etc. as they always did until now.

systemd is in every way i care about a microsoft product. And systemd’s attack vectors by “needless dependencies” just have been added to the list of “prooven” (not only predicted) to be as bad as any M$ product in this regard.

I would not go as far to say that this specific attack was done by microsoft itself (how could i ?), but i consider it a possibility given the facts that they once publicly named linux/open source a “cancer” and now their “sudden” change to “support the open source world” looks to me like the poison “Gríma” used on “Théoden” as well as some other observations and interpretations. however i strongly believe that microsoft secretly actually “likes” every single damage any of systemd’s pointlessly added dependencies or other flaws could do to linux/open source very much. and why shouldn’t they like any damage that was done to any of their obvious opponents (as in money-gain and “dictatorship”-power)? it’s a us company, what would one expect?

And if you want to argue that systemd is not “officially” a product of the microsoft company… well people also say “i googled it” when they mean “i used one of the search engines actually better than google.com” same with other things like “tempo” or “zewa” where i live. since the systemd developer works for microsoft and it seems he works on systemd as part of this work contract, and given all the microsoft style flaws within from the beginning, i consider systemd a product of microsoft. i think systemd overall also “has components” of apple products, but these are IMHO none of technical nature and thus far from beeing part of the discussion here and also apple does not produce “even more systemd” also apple has -as of my experience- very other flaws i did not encounter in systemd (yet?) thus it’s clearly not an apple product.

usually at first you can do such, and later on, when a ceo wants more money, you then can buy that together with the new “pro” features actually nobody needs nor wants.

maybe better look for more stable solutions before they start acting like a broadcom ;-)

Before pointing to vulnerabilities of open source software in general, please always look into the details, who -and if so - “without any need” thus also maybe “why” introduced the actual attack vector in the first place. The strength of open source in action should not be seen as a deficit, especially not in such a context.

To me it looks like an evilish company has put lots of efforts over many years to inject its very own overall steady attack-vector-increase by “otherwise” needless increase of indroduction of uncounted dependencies into many distros.

such a ‘needless’ dependency is liblzma for ssh:

https://lwn.net/ml/oss-security/20240329155126.kjjfduxw2yrlxgzm@awork3.anarazel.de/

openssh does not directly use liblzma. However debian and several other distributions patch openssh to support systemd notification, and libsystemd does depend on lzma.

… and that was were and how the attack then surprisingly* “happened”

I consider the attack vector here to have been the superlfous systemd with its excessive dependency cancer. Thus result of using a Microsoft-alike product. Using M$-alike code, what would one expect to get?

*) no surprises here, let me predict that we will see more of their attack vectors in action in the future: as an example have a look at the init process, systemd changed it into a ‘network’ reachable service. And look at all the “cute” capabilities it was designed to “need” ;-)

however distributions free of microsoft(-ish) systemd are available for all who do not want to get the “microsoft experience” in otherwise security driven** distros

**) like doing privilege separation instead of the exact opposite by “design”

there was a study saying that there is not “the” best way of learning, but it is best to combine multiple ways, like with an app, by book, listening to audio only (i listened to radio stations via internet and got some exercise for free), a bit of talking, visiting a country that only speaks that language and so on. trying everything a bit in parallel.

that is because of our brain learns better when given more different types of “connections” to learn.

i started with duolingo (website only, not the app and only the free parts) 4 years ago and now i speak quite fluently. but i also partly read a book about grammatics, visited a spanish speaking country (more than once), viewed movies with only subtitle in my language and did lots of phone calls in spanish only.

my advice is:

look at free apps, whatever pleases you, take chances, listen to the sound (movies, radio), try to speak, and read easy books or go through exercise books.

duolingo is good to keep on going while not really motivated as the shortest thing that counts are really only minutes and one can choose to do something that is already easy. this way at least continuation is kept even if pace is down for a while. and it is much easier to go on with pace when not having really stopped.

i am happy to have a raspberry pi setup connected to a VLAN switch, internet is behind a modem (like bridged mode) connected with ethernet to one switchport while the raspi routes everything through one tagged physical GB switchport. the setup works fine with two raspi’s and failover without tcp disconnections during an actual failover, only few seconds delay when that happens, so basically voip calls recover after seconds, streaming is not affected, while in a game a second off might be too much already, however as such hardware failures happen rarely, i am running only one of them anyway.

for firewall i am using shorewall, while for some special routing i also use unbound dns resolver (one can easily configure static results for any record) and haproxy with sni inspection for specific https routing for the rather specialized setup i have.

my wifi is done by an openwrt but i only use it for having separate wifis bridged to their own vlans.

thus this setup allows for multi-zone networks at home like a wifi for visitors with daily changing passwords and another fror chromecast or home automation, each with their own rules, hardware redundancy, special tweaking, everything that runs on gnu/linux is possible including pihole, wireguard, ddns solutions, traffic statistics, traffic shaping/QOS, traffic dumps or even SSL interception if you really want to import your own CA into your phone and see what data your phones apps (those that don’t use certificate pinning) are transfering when calling home, and much more.

however regarding ddns it sometimes feels more safe and reliable to have a somehow reserved IP that would not change. some providers offer rather cheap tunnels for this purpose. i once had a free (ipv6) tunnel at hurricane electronic (besides another one for IPv4) but now i use VMs in data centers.

i do not see any ready product to be that flexible. however to me the best ready router system seems to be openwrt, you are not bound to a hardware vendor, get security updates longer than with any commercial product, can 1:1 copy your config to a new device even if the hardware changes and has the possibility to add packages with special features to it.

“openwrt” is IMHO the most flexible ready solution for longtime use. same as “pfsense” is also very worth looking at and has some similarities to openwrt while beeing different.

i have to admit, that my point ‘just don’t do it’ in reality does not garantee to prevent any trouble. it still is possible to be sued for things someone else did.

also one suggestion to think about:

if the seller just sprays some random changes over a book for every sold version, one would have differences in “every” sold version to every other sold version. by blindly changing those parts to something else you could reveal which exact two/three versions you had for diffing.

UPDATE: someone else here had the same thought a bit earlier…

my suggestion to not do it stays the same ;-)

it could be interesting to figure things out how they work, what could be done to prevent or circumvent such prevention, but actually doing it seems risky no matter what.

have a look on “snowdrop” (search together with “steganography”), its basically the opposite of what you want, but worth mentioning here. watermarks could be placed into whitespace (not limited to actual spaces or linebreaks, intentionally changed usage of paragraphs, tabs or even page boundaries could possibly be detected after scanning andeven after OCR. IMHO snowdrop uses -depending on choosen operation mode- small errors like misspelled words, commata etc but also has a mode that comes along with fine grammar and without misspelled words…

how do you make sure that by diff’ing two versions you do cover "everything’ that has been deliberately placed into both documents but share literally the same informations?

lets say you bought two books at two different stores with two different watermarks. if the watermark contains the date and time of the purchase and the only difference of this were the minutes because you bought them within the same hour, the remaining watermark would point to all buyers that bought exactly this book in this hour - worldwide. but still it could be “very” precise depending on all other(!) buyers, if they exist at all within that timeframe. what if the watermark includes unix epoch? then the part which is the same in both watermarks would not be bound by hours, but by seconds, 10seconds, 100seconds etc.

and you could not know if there were other watermarks hidden that just happened to be the same for your two (three.?) purchases (same country, continent, payment method, credit card holder name, name of internet provider used during purchase, browser used etc.) it fully depends on the creator of the watermark what would be included and what not. if you happem to know all that (without any possibleexemptions) you might be on the safe side, but if not…

my general suggestion here is:

• if you want to be sure to not getting into trouble, then just don’t do it.
• if that book is too expensive compared to its content, just not buying it possibly also helps the market to fix the problem.
• save that time and instead help those who already fight for a better world.
• search already licence free books (or such as “cc” licensed) and promote those instead, help improving free resources like openstreetmap, wiki* but do not publish licence-poisoned content there, wtite it yourself, alway.
• write your own book and publish it free.

just to mention… the “safe” side sometimes seems limited but maybe is actually not, if you really look at it.

my 2 cents just in case…:

A raid6 is not a replacement for backup ;-) i use rdiff-backup which is easy to use, stores only one full backup and all increments are to the past while it is only possible to delete the oldest increments (afaik no “merging”) i never needed anything else. The backup should be one off-site and another one offline to be synced once in a while manually. Make complete dumps (including triggers, etc) from databases before doing the backup ;-)

i like to have a recreateable server setup, like setting it up manually, then putting everything i did into ansilbe, try to recreate a “spare” server using ansible and the backup, test everything and you can be sure you also have “documented” your setup to a good degree.

for hardware i do not have much assumptions about performance (until it hits me), but an always-running in-house server should better safe power (i learned this the costly way). it is possible to turn cpu’s off and run only on one cpu with only a reduced freq in times without performance needs, that could help a bit, at least it would feel good to do so while turning cpu’s on again + set higher frequency is quick and can be easily scripted.

hard drives: make sure you buy 24/7, they are usually way more hassle-free than the consumer grades and likely “only” cost double the price. i would always place the system on SSD but always as raid1 (not raid6), while the “other” could then maybe be a magnetic one set to write-mostly.

as i do not buy “server” hardware for my home server, i always buy the components twice when i change something, so that i would have the spare parts ready at hand when i need it. running a server for 5+ years often ends up in not beeing able to buy the same again, and then you have to first search what you want, order, test, maybe send back as it might not fit… instable memory? mainboard released smoke signs? with spare parts at hand, a matter of minutes! only thing i am missing with my consumer grade home server hardware is ecc ram :-/

for cooling i like to use a 12cm fan and only power it with 5v (instead of the 12v it wants) so that it runs smoothly slow and nearly as silent as a passive only cooling, but heat does not build up in the summer. do not forget to clean the dust once in a while… i never had a 5v powered 12V-12cm fan that had any problems with the bearings and i think one of them ran for over a decade. i think the 12volt fans last longer with 5v, but no warranty from me ;-)

even with headless i like to have a quick way at hand to get to a console in case of network might not be working. i once used a serial cable and my notebook, then a small monitor/keyboard, now i use pikvm and could look to my servers physical console from my mobile phone (but would need ssl client certificate and TOTP to do so) but this involves network, i know XD

you likely want smart monitoring and once in a while run memtest.

for servers i also like to have some monitoring that could push a message to my phone somehow for some foreseeable conditions that i would like to handle manually.

debsums, logcheck logwatch and fail2ban are also worth looking at depending on what you want.

also after updating packages, have a look at lsof | egrep “DEL|deleted” to see what programs need a simple restart to really use libraries that have been updated. so reboots only for newer kernels.

ok this is more than 2 cents, maybe 5. never mind

hope these ideas help a bit

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