Notices by Aaron Toponce ⚛️:debian: (atoponce@fosstodon.org)

This will probably get spread around as misinformation, because people read the titles, not the articles. So let's start with the obvious:

#Signal is secure.

Now what everyone didn't read:

> The FBI said the information came from a “sensitive source with excellent access” and introduced the report as a warning about “extremist actors targeting law enforcement officers and federal facilities”.

In other words, the FBI had an informant on the inside. AKA, "a spy".

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/21/fbi-signal-group-chat-immigration

@evan True, but I would argue the entropy collected by the Linux kernel is still hardware randomness, it's just processed after the fact.

Most hardware random generators do exactly that: generate noise then do post-processing to whiten the data.

The raw data from a Geiger counter for example would lead to biased output, so we hash it or run it through a debiaser to clean it up.

Are true random number generators all hardware-only, or are there any examples of non-hardware true random number generators?

M(77232917) is officially the 50th Mersenne Prime.

M(77232917) was discovered seven and half years ago. Now, thanks to the diligent efforts of many GIMPS volunteers, every smaller Mersenne number has been successfully double-checked. Thus, M(77232917) officially becomes the 50th Mersenne prime.

This is a significant milestone for the GIMPS project. The next Mersenne milestone is not far away, please consider joining this important double-checking effort.

https://www.mersenne.org/report_exponent/?exp_lo=77232917&full=1

#math #maths

RIP Jack Daniels. Your 2Q plans are literally one of the best out there. It's hard to qualify just exactly how amazing they are as well as your "Running Formula" book.

https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a65664991/jack-daniels-dies/

#running #RunnersOfMastodon

@mattl Seriously.

I just put an HTML page together, CSS and JavaScript as well, and everything worked on the first try.

I'm dumbfounded. I don't know what to do with the rest of my evening.

Dear DuckDuckGo,

Fuck off.

Thanks,
Everyone

OpenAI wants to release a web browser to challenge Google Chrome.

That's all we need. OpenAI collecting even more data.

Oh, wait. They're basing it on Chromium. Really sticking it to the man!

*facepalm*

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/09/openai-to-release-web-browser-in-challenge-to-google-chrome.html

#Redis is #OpenSource again. Probably too late though. Everyone I know switched to Valkey.

#FreeSoftware

https://antirez.com/news/151

This is Internet Gold.

> "... it is important to note that the compression algorithm used by lzip only discards the unimportant data. And if it was unimportant before, what makes it so important now? Huh? In fact, many users may find that compressing their entire file system and then restoring it will be a good way to learn what is truly important."

https://web.archive.org/web/20010608045914/http://lzip.sourceforge.net/faq.html

#compression #AprilFools #opensource #lzip

#Ubuntu is moving away from GNU coreutils to Rust-based uutils coreutils with Ubuntu 25.10. There are two big differences with this move:

1. uutils coreutils is MIT licensed, not GPL.
2. Obviously, it's written in Rust, a memory-safe compiled language, unlike C.

IMO, this is a good move.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-oxidising-ubuntu/56995

#gnu #rust #linux

@cks Agreed. I haven't looked over the source code, but 100% compatibility is an optimistic claim I think. GNU coreutils is 35 years old. That's a long time for one-off quirks to get implemented for all sorts of edge cases.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1950144

The SystemV filesystem is getting removed from the #Linux kernel, as it had a bad bug proving no one was actually using it.

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/vfs/vfs.git/commit/?h=vfs-6.15.sysv&id=448fa70158f9b348e71869cfe4a31988e07b20b2

@evan Why wouldn't I chose the max option?

Developer applies at @ubuntu, goes through extensive hiring filters and many interviews, gets an offer in hand, accepts the offer, quits their job, only for Canonical to retract the offer.

Don't work for Canonical.

#Ubuntu #Linux

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1ij4itg/canonical_what_a_shame/

@dalias @dimpase I agree. What I don't understand why you would choose to leak metadata unnecessarily when stronger alternatives exist.

@dimpase @dalias I didn't call it grave.

@dimpase @dalias It is horrible. No password manager should be doing this. But it's not leading to the compromise of each account ("grave"), just leaking what they are ("bad", "horrible", "not good").