Linux
How the System Call That Ties Unix Together Came About – The New Stack
It’s an everyday command in the life of developers, sysadmins, and Unix lovers everywhere. So it’s remarkable to remember that Unix’s pipe command was implemented in a single day, representing not only a great moment in computing history, but also a uniquely important moment for its profound impact on the culture of Unix.
And it changed the way we program ever since.
New Linux kernel has improved random-number generation • The Register
A significant rewrite of the Linux kernel's random-number generator is underway, ensuring Linux-based cryptography is a bit more secure, particularly in virtual machines, and some software a bit smoother to run.
As outlined by the author of the changes, Jason A Donenfeld, the newly released kernel 5.17 contains the first stage of the big rewrite, but more will follow in 5.18. Among other changes, the /dev/random and /dev/urandom devices now do exactly the same. This brings the Linux kernel in line with FreeBSD and macOS.
The code is contained in a module called random.c, originally written by Ted T'so for kernel 1.3 in 1994. It implements a Unix-style special character device called /dev/random which gives a stream of pseudorandom data. Building this into the kernel was a big deal, and the /dev/random device was adopted into DEC/Compaq Tru64, FreeBSD, HP-UX, IBM AIX, NetBSD, macOS, SGI IRIX, and Sun Solaris. This might make it one of the single most widely influential new features from Linux onto the broader Unix world.
Generating truly random numbers in pure software is non-trivial. If you run the same code repeatedly with the same inputs, it should produce the same results. Thus if you write a program to output random numbers, it'll produce a predictable, pseudorandom stream of values. If you can predict the output, you can figure out how software using it is going to work and, for instance, break encryption based on it. Researchers managed this for Windows 2000, for instance.
It’s a much better idea to use sudo checkinstall rather then sudo make install
It’s a much better idea to use sudo checkinstall rather then sudo make install. 👻
New “FontOnLake” Linux Malware Discovered
The magic behind configure, make, make install
If you’ve used any flavour of Unix for development, you’ve probably installed software from source with this magic incantation:
./configure make make install
I know I’ve typed it a lot, but in my early days using Linux I didn’t really understand what it meant, I just knew that if I wanted to install software this was the spell to recite.
Libre Office 7.2
I was reading that LibreOffice 7.2 is out and it has big speed improvements for opening very large spreadsheets. That is kind of a big deal because the slowness of Libre Calc at dealing with big spreadsheets like the voter file was always a major drag for me.
That said, since learning PANDAS going back to large spreadsheets seems kind of unnecessary, although I guess it’s nice to drag and drop certain things you want to glance through.