Kees Cook: glibc select weakness fixed
In 2009, I reported this bug to glibc, describing the problem that exists when a program is using select, and has its open file descriptor resource limit raised above 1024 (FD_SETSIZE). If a network daemon starts using the FD_SET/FD_CLR glibc macros on fdset variables for descriptors larger than 1024, glibc will happily write beyond the end of the fdset variable, producing a buffer overflow condition. (This problem had existed since the introduction of the macros, so, for decades? I figured it was long over-due to have a report opened about it.)
At the time, I was told this wasn t going to be fixed and every program using [select] must be considered buggy. 2 years later still more people kept asking for this feature and continued to be told no .
But, as it turns out, a few months later after the most recent no , it got silently fixed anyway, with the bug left open as Won t Fix ! I m glad Florian did some house-cleaning on the glibc bug tracker, since I d otherwise never have noticed that this protection had been added to the ever-growing list of -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 protections.
I ll still recommend everyone use poll instead of select, but now I won t be so worried when I see requests to raise the open descriptor limit above 1024.
2014, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
It's that time of the year, again, when I lan to go to Debconf, reserve vacation, get visa waiver, book tickets. Let's hope nothing blocks me from attending this time. It has been too long.
Now I just need to finish up 
It is unfortunate that some of the client libraries are inefficient, but I'm enjoying my exposure to Amazon's Route53 API.
(This is unrelated to the previous post(s) about operating a DNS service..)
For an idea of scale I host just over 170 zones at the moment.
For the first 25 zones Amazon would charge $0.50 a month, then $0.10 after that. Which would mean:
A new package 
I m probably the last person on the planet to get around to doing this, but
I figure it s probably about time my venerable old 1024D key was put out to
pasture.
My 
So, it seems that for a lot of people using unstable,
hardware-related permissions (shutdown/reboot, suspend/hibernate,
devices mount/umount etc.) have been broken since some times.
That's usually the case for people using GNOME with lightdm
display manager, Xfce with either gdm or lightdm.
It seems that recently, policykit (which is used by GNOME and
Xfce) switched from consolekit backend to logind backend
(yeah, systemd-logind). So applications using policykit
needs to handle that correctly, and that means beeing sure a logind
session is correctly setup, which is done by installing the package
libpam-systemd.
For now, it's still possible to not switch to systemd as init
system, by installing the systemd-shim package before
libpam-systemd. Be aware that (at least with the current state of
affairs), this is only true with logind before 204. When systemd
maintainers start transitionning to a later version, only
systemd-sysv (so, systemd as init system) will work.
For people reluctant to switch to systemd, they can use
systemd-shim for now. Then when systemd 205+ enters the archive,
either lose those hardware permissions, or try to improve
systemd-shim to handle that situation.
There's not much we (Xfce/LightDM maintainers) can do about
that.
Political protest or anti-competitive mischief?
Why were taxi drivers not arrested for their protest today? Given that the roads are the place where taxis and their competitors do business, can this blockade really be considered a political protest or is it an anti-competitive practice in blatant disregard of the law?
Weapons of mass destruction
Before even having breakfast you could probably find 10,000 cyclists in central London willing to sign a petition declaring taxis are a weapon of mass destruction. Once again, while there are honest drivers, there is a more than trivial number of taxi drivers who are a genuine danger to the lives of cyclists, scooters, motorcycles and occasionally pedestrians. I have personally experienced one of these thugs ramming my bicycle from behind (his hard-nosed insurer eventually paid up but without admitting liability). The police who attended the incident even told me they had seen so many accidents like this they wouldn't dare cycle themselves.
The web is full of examples 
In the good old days, every elevator had a man or woman who would sit on a stool and press buttons to operate the doors and motors.
Some up-market department stores and hotels still have an elevator man to add a touch of nostalgia. The vast majority, however, have eliminated these jobs thanks to automatic elevators.
Now, even aircraft can 
With the release of 
Some days ago, I bit the bullet and accepted the 
[update] I will do another blog post. Good news: My Tor node is alive again! Just no longer as an exit relay, as properly pointed out by many, but as a 
