Linux Format July 2021

Jonni Bidwell Do I still get a chuckle if I say Windows? Sigh. Well anyway, our friendly contact at UKFast agreed that our server needed putting out of its misery. We doff our moth-eaten caps as we remember its legacy. But we (well, I) quite like the new website that its successor is powering. Christian Cawley Keyboard-dependent text entry is in dire need of replacement. With AR and VR solutions for almost everything else, the lack of a post-QWERTY input method for commands and text, over 50 years after the Mother of all Demos is baffling. (This has nothing to do with my typing ability!) Nick Peers I’m fed up with disposable devices with built-in obsolescence, like phones that can’t easily be repaired or upgraded. Tiny manufacturer Fairphone has shown…

Jonni Bidwell Do I still get a chuckle if I say Windows? Sigh. Well anyway, our friendly contact at UKFast agreed that our server needed putting out of its misery. We doff our moth-eaten caps as we remember its legacy. But we (well, I) quite like the new website that its successor is powering. Christian Cawley Keyboard-dependent text entry is in dire need of replacement. With AR and VR solutions for almost everything else, the lack of a post-QWERTY input method for commands and text, over 50 years after the Mother of all Demos is baffling. (This has nothing to do with my typing ability!) Nick Peers I’m fed up with disposable devices with built-in obsolescence, like phones that can’t easily be repaired or upgraded. Tiny manufacturer Fairphone has shown you can support a phone…

Technology never stops advancing – that’s a blessing and a curse. Look at Ubuntu 21.04 and the seemingly never-ending story of the Wayland display protocol. It’s been in development for over a decade (see our first feature on it in 2011’s LXF141 by a certain Alexander Tolstoy), yet is still only just making it into Ubuntu, after an earlier failed attempt with Ubuntu 17.10. You can point at a lot of things – Nvidia, screencasting, program incompatibilities – but ultimately it’s a user experience thing. So four years on and the planets are finally aligning for Wayland. Even that immovable mountain of Nvidia driver support appears to be falling into place. Fedora has gone full Wayland and now Canonical thinks that it’s the right time, too. This is a good…

Technology never stops advancing – that’s a blessing and a curse. Look at Ubuntu 21.04 and the seemingly never-ending story of the Wayland display protocol. It’s been in development for over a decade (see our first feature on it in 2011’s LXF141 by a certain Alexander Tolstoy), yet is still only just making it into Ubuntu, after an earlier failed attempt with Ubuntu 17.10. You can point at a lot of things – Nvidia, screencasting, program incompatibilities – but ultimately it’s a user experience thing. So four years on and the planets are finally aligning for Wayland. Even that immovable mountain of Nvidia driver support appears to be falling into place. Fedora has gone full Wayland and now Canonical thinks that it’s the right time, too. This is a good thing, even…

The University of Minnesota has been banned from contributing to the Linux kernel after two researchers from the institution were discovered deliberately submitting patches with flaws. Qiushi Wu and Kangjie Lu’s paper (http://bit.ly/LXF277Paper) reveals how they submitted patches to the kernel to fix issues, but in fact introduced problems – which the researchers called ‘hypocrite commits’. They claimed this would show how malicious users could slip dangerous code into the kernel, in a similar way to how white hat hackers identify security holes in software. Of course, white hat hackers are invited to find security holes by the people behind the software, and are often given rewards for doing so. Wu and Lu neither asked nor told anyone in the community what they were doing. Their actions have led to…

The University of Minnesota has been banned from contributing to the Linux kernel after two researchers from the institution were discovered deliberately submitting patches with flaws. Qiushi Wu and Kangjie Lu’s paper (http://bit.ly/LXF277Paper) reveals how they submitted patches to the kernel to fix issues, but in fact introduced problems – which the researchers called ‘hypocrite commits’. They claimed this would show how malicious users could slip dangerous code into the kernel, in a similar way to how white hat hackers identify security holes in software. Of course, white hat hackers are invited to find security holes by the people behind the software, and are often given rewards for doing so. Wu and Lu neither asked nor told anyone in the community what they were doing. Their actions have led to accusations that…