Previously, previously.

Despite having a stable release model and cadence since December 2003, Linux kernel version numbers seem to baffle and confuse those that run across them, causing numerous groups to mistakenly make versioning statements that are flat out false. So let’s go into how this all works in detail.

May species are threatened with extinction from sheer excess heat.

Racist housing policies drove down the property values im the US neighborhoods where blacks were allowed to live; adding injury to injury. Their houses were taxed for far more than they were worth.

The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that practice it. But I make exceptions for some articles because I consider them important -- and I present this comment about them.

*Up to 150,000 residents of El Fasher are missing since North Darfur capital fell to paramilitary Rapid Support Forces,* which is one of the two warring factions.

A large number of them seem to have been massacred, but investigators and reporters are not allowed in.

San José State University's president has fired a tenured professor for involvement in a protest "violating rules". She is contesting this with the help of the faculty union.

After the previous aside on a gossip bug, I realized I should do a tour of each daemon. I started with gossipd because it’s my favorite, having changed so much from what it originally did into something which now mainly exports the “gossip_store” file for other subdaemons and plugins to use.

Margaret Atwood responds to big questions, after clarifying them philosophically with vigorous logic.

It’s been almost 2 full years since Linux became a CNA (Certificate Numbering Authority) which meant that we (i.e. the kernel.org community) are now responsible for issuing all CVEs for the Linux kernel. During this time, we’ve become one of the largest creators of CVEs by quantity, going from nothing to number 3 in 2024 to number 1 in 2025. Naturally, this has caused some questions about how we are both doing all of this work, and how people can keep track of it.

Some states in Malaysia make it a legal obligation for Muslim men to participate in prayer on Friday. Failure can be punished by a long prison term.

Being labeled a Muslim in Malaysia is not a matter of choice or belief. If your parents were Muslim, the national government designates you as a Muslim. Likewise if you are racially Malay. This is an offense against the human right, freedom of religion.

In general, countries that are generally considered "Muslim" have laws that deny people religious freedom. Typically these laws ban conversion of Muslims to any other religion or to Atheism, as well as other more specific injustices.

A good example is Egypt.

I stumbled over a bug while doing some work on gossipd, so I decided to record myself tracking it down.

I had reduced it to a simple test, and you can follow along from there. Not sure how clear I was, since I didn’t know where this would go! You can find the final pull request on GitHub.

(satire) *[The bullshitter] Announces 5,000% Increase In All Numbers.*

*Entire Chain of Command [from Hegseth down to the soldiers who fired the shots] Could Be [prosecuted under actual US military law] for Killing Boat Strike Survivors, Sources Say,*

Thus, the statement that soldiers are allowed to refuse an order to commit a war crime is half the point. The other half is that those who receive an order to commit a crime must refuse, lest they make themselves criminals and later be prosecuted for those crimes. "I was obeying orders" is not a defense.

One unfortunate consequence of this situation is that their only remaining way to avoid such prosecution is to have a president who protects criminals. That could become a system that generates soldiers desperate to be pardoned by the president for crimes they committed for per.

*New York City bill aims to ban toxic "forever chemicals" in firefighting gear.* The states of Massachusetts and Connecticut did this last year, but New York City is a bigger market than either of them.

*Pentagon says every national guard [soldier] deployed in Washington DC "is now armed."

The hate-spreader is using an shooting attack on some national guard troops in Washington as an opportunity to make it easier for violence against civilians to occur. Such violence serves his purposes.

Only use case I care about is: scrub thru video; select a series of rectangles and start/end times; run ffmpeg with a series of "delogo" filters.

Auto-detection or anything "AI" is an explicit non-goal.

Web search for this topic has been utterly poisoned by grifters.

Previously.

There are many reasons, unrelated to artist reimbursement, why Spotify is the dirt worst of the streaming platforms. I trust by now you are aware of these.

I want to make it very clear that I am not criticising anyone for using streaming platforms. Everyone streams, living is hell and we all love music. [...]

As you can see, the vast majority of people who streamed All Hell did so using Spotify. Unfortunately, of the major streaming platforms, Spotify pays significantly less per stream than anywhere else.

If everyone who streamed All Hell on Spotify had done so using Tidal instead, we would have received an extra £31,847.38, which would double the amount we made from streaming of the album in this time period. Or if everyone used Apple Music it would have been £12,331 more.

Relatedly, today is Bandcamp Friday when 100% of your money goes to the artists.

"But what do you use, jwz?" none of you are asking. I'm glad you asked! I do not use any streaming platforms. I purchase music as files that then live on my computers and computer-like devices that are backed up on hard drives that I own. I listen to them with headphones that have analog cables.

When at all possible, I purchase music from Bandcamp, because of all the options available, that is the one where the artists make the most money.

When an album is not available on Bandcamp (as often happens with bands signed to major labels who contractually prohibit the bands from making their music available on Bandcamp) I have been using Qobuz, which seems to be the least-bad second option at this time. The files are high quality and DRM-free.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

"Part of the reason why I like this questioning is the more constitutional you want to make it, the more precise you want to make it, the more you're going to need my product," Karp said. His reasoning is that if it's constitutional, you would have to make 100% sure of the exact conditions it's happening in, and in order to do that, the military would have to use Palantir's technology, for which it pays roughly $10 billion under its current contract.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

"What if the ship of theseus was sentient" is not a question I was prepared to grapple with on a monday

BTW, sex dolls are alive in the Toy Story universe.

Extremely relevant previouslies:

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

I added support for PAM to XScreenSaver in 1998, when PAM itself was a little two-year-old baby. Your keyboard was still PS2 and HDMI hadn't been invented yet. For lo these many decades, nobody could agree on what went in /etc/pam.conf or /etc/pam.d/login and it was all a giant mess.

Things that used to sometimes be true:

• If /etc/pam.d/xscreensaver didn't exist you couldn't unlock the screen at all.
• "cp /etc/pam.d/login /etc/pam.d/xscreensaver" was insufficient, some lines had to be omitted.
• You have to call pam_chauthtok() or an unauthorized user might be able to unlock.
• No, if you call pam_chauthtok() it will always fail so don't do that.
• No wait, actually you have to call pam_chauthtok() because it has side effects but you have to ignore its failure.
• You have to PAM_REFRESH_CRED every time.
• No wait, that doesn't work, you have to PAM_REINITIALIZE_CRED every time instead. But not on Solaris.

I could not even hazard a guess as to which of these things are still true, or how many decades ago they stopped being true, or which of them are influenced by Linux versus BSD versus Solaris versus HPUX versus AIX versus Kerberos or other things that nobody cares about any more.

So I am considering making the following changes:

• Always call pam_chauthtok() and respect its result status. I think sshd does this.
• Remove the configure option --enable-pam-check-account-type (which probably should always have been a runtime option, not a compile-time option, but here we are).
• At installation time, create /etc/pam.d/xscreensaver as a file containing the single line "@include login"

What I would like to know is: will this break things on your system? Particular emphasis for this question on people running weird-assed obscure systems.