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Blasts from the past...
by Colin McGregor 21 Sep '26

21 Sep '26

Blasts from the past. Back in the day (think 30-40 years ago), if you wanted to connect to another computer over the phone lines you would get a Hayes (or Hayes compatible) modem (yes, okay there were some non-Hayes compatible modem out there, but), then connect that to your IBM, Commodore, Atari, Apple, or .... computer, run a terminal program, type a command along the lines of ATDP5551212 (or whatever) to get your computer to connect to a local electronic BBS (Bulletin Board System) (likely NOT Internet connected). In its own way, back in the day it was all good (legal) fun. I was reminded of the above due to another blast from the past recently. I ran across the current issue of "2600" magazine for sale at an Indigo Bookstore. Back in the day "2600" carried articles about things you could do of ...questionable legality... with the telephone network. You get the impression that phone ...tricks.... are still an area that would be happy to write about. What drew my attention in the current issue of "2600" was an article titled "Bulletin Board Systems Are Back!". In summary, it went into using an ESP8266 (think an earlier/cheaper version of an ESP32, semi-Arduino compatible module with built-in WiFi) as what would appear to your computer as a Hayes compatible modem. You do need to assemble an ESP8266 module and an RS232 to TTL module total cost if ordered from one of the usual suspects (like AliExpress in China) under $10. Assemble the parts, install the appropriate software (which they identify in the article) and you can connect to any computer on the internet that supports telnet connections (these days, most don't). Still this does mean even machines like the Commodore 64, Atari 800 or other machines of that vintage can (with an RS232 adapter) can (conditionally) connect to the Internet or they can host a BBS. Neat stuff...

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Harddisk recommendation
by William Park 20 Sep '26

20 Sep '26

One of my harddisks in BTRFS multi-disk backup array died. I didn't know, until I rebooted after system update. Fortunately, I had enough space to cover this failure. But, if another harddisk dies, then I will need to buy a new one. What is your recommendation for NAS harddisk, nowadays? It's been awhile since I shopped for a harddisk. Google recommends Seagate Ironwolf Pro, but I got burned by Seagate before, and this one that died is also Seagate.

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Junk Independence Day - September 20
by Giles Orr 20 Sep '26

20 Sep '26

Scott usually shares this, but has been unusually busy. So I'm filling in ... and I highly recommend the event. Please see: https://hacklab.to/archives/junk-independence-day-20-september-2026/ 1-5PM, Sunday 20 September @ HackLab TO, 1677 St. Clair Ave W. Essentially JID is an opportunity to bring your electronics-related discards to a place where others can choose to take some of it home (and you can take someone else's discards), and at the end of the event a registered recycling company will take the remaining items. The stuff that comes in varies from the mundane (old ethernet cables, broken down laptops) to the extraordinary (4x6ft LED signage, 50 brand new mystery Raspberry Pi hats). I don't think I've ever gone home empty-handed, and this keeps a lot of stuff out of the waste stream while hugely entertaining geeks like us. I hope to see you there. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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Fwd: [kwlug-disc] [scs-grads] Participants Needed for a Study on Programming Experience and Code Comprehension
by Ron 09 Sep '26

09 Sep '26

If anyone's interested, Albert gave permission to forward to this list too. -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: [kwlug-disc] [scs-grads] Participants Needed for a Study on Programming Experience and Code Comprehension Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2026 15:16:28 +0000 From: Albert Shi <albert.shi(a)uwaterloo.ca> Reply-To: KWLUG discussion <kwlug-disc(a)kwlug.org> To: kwlug-disc(a)kwlug.org <kwlug-disc(a)kwlug.org> Hi all, My name is Guoshuai (Albert) Shi, and I am a PhD student working under the supervision of Professor Michael W. Godfrey and Professor Shane McIntosh in the Software Analytics Group (SWAG) in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. We have created a research study that examines how programmers read, understand, and repair source code, and how this relates to programming experience. We would like to invite you to participate by completing a short online pre-screening questionnaire for the main phase of the research, which involves code comprehension tasks. The questionnaire asks about your programming background, including your experience with Java and general programming experience. Completing the questionnaire will take approximately 3-5 minutes. This questionnaire is just a quick step to see if the main study's tasks would be a good fit for you. If so, we'll follow up with an invitation to join. Participation at every stage is voluntary, and you're free to stop at any point without penalty. This study has been reviewed and received ethics clearance through a University of Waterloo Research Ethics Board (REB #46625). If you are interested, please follow the link below to review the consent information and complete the questionnaire: https://forms.gle/6q67SFHpX2aJi6fK9 If you have any questions about the questionnaire or the study, please feel free to contact me at albert.shi(a)uwaterloo.ca. Thank you for your time and consideration. Sincerely, Guoshuai (Albert) Shi, PhD Student David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science University of Waterloo albert.shi(a)uwaterloo.ca

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KiTTY's remote control is fundamentally insecure
by Ron 09 Sep '26

09 Sep '26

At today's meeting, Omarchy & Open Source funding was discussed. Security was one aspect of that. And, on cue, Brodie Robertson has a video out about: This Security Bug Is Too Funny To Ignore It has to do with Kitty terminal (now the default terminal in Omarchy) with kind of crazy default settings. Like "allow_remote=yes". Some links: > As a POC, unzip the attached pwn.zip > <https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/files/3749391/pwn.zip> file, and > run |cat pwn.txt| in a kitty instance with remote control enabled. It > will run the command |touch /tmp/pwned|. This could easily have been > called README instead and the command could have been |rm -rf /|. The > kitty got pwned by a cat! This breaks a lot of deep implicit > assumptions, such as "catting a file should be like, the safest thing > to do, ever". Ouch! https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2084 It has been known for several decades that terminal control sequences are a security nightmare. They can get injected to the terminal by the most innocuous actions, such as cat-ting a text file or ... github.com Kitty's remote control is fundamentally insecure · Issue #2084 · kovidgoyal/kitty <#> It has been known for several decades that terminal control sequences are a security nightmare. They can get injected to the terminal by the most innocuous actions, such as cat-ting a text file or receiving an e-mail or IM message (if yo... 🔗 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2084 <https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2084> x.com blasty (@bl4sty) on X <#> 🚨 RELEASE: Omarchy Linux Kitty terminal Remote Code Execution exploit 🚨 Stop. Using. This. GARBAGE. If you install kitty (a popular terminal emulator) on Omarchy Linux you open yourself to REMOTE CODE EXECUTION BY LOOKING AT THINGS. in the screenshot you can see `curl something` leading to si… 🔗 https://x.com/bl4sty/status/2096647017992982592 <https://x.com/bl4sty/status/2096647017992982592>

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Help
by tom.fran 08 Sep '26

08 Sep '26

Hi all.I am new here and new at Linux stuff. I gust convert my laptop from Win 10 to Linux Cinnamon and it basically running. I like to install wine on it so as to add some of the Exe program I use. It refuses to be installed and I don’t know what to do from here. I wonder if there is someone in the east of Scarborough that I can contact and give me a hand on solving the problem. My email is tom.fran(a)primus.ca Kindly, Tom

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meeting tomorrow (Tuesday)
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 07 Sep '26

07 Sep '26

Apparently no speaker has been arranged, but there should be enough to chat about. At 7:30 PM, go to GTALUG's NextCloud: <https://hub.gtalug.org/call/7m45sf9i> Bring your questions and answers. Here are some topics that interest me: Tom, a new subscriber, is having some trouble installing Wine. If he attends, perhaps we can help hem. TV sets spying on household: Gamers Nexus has recently reported on their research <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA> Amazon's new set-top boxes have Vega OS. Built on Linux + React Native. Is there any use in cracking them? My guess: not really. <https://developer.amazon.com/apps-and-games/vega> Rowhammer, a family security weakness of dynamic RAM (i.e. almost all RAM we use). In particular, U of T researches have very effectively compromised machines using industrial Nvidia GPUs, even though their RAM is protected by ECC! <https://www.techtimes.com/articles/325726/20260827/rowhammer-breaks-nvidia-…> Compromising machines without ECC should be child's play. Amazing progress in enumerating polyominoes. <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22446> I can talk a bit about this since my results, published in 1981, were the most that was known for about 20 years. But I have yet to read this paper. Some Russian drones include Raspberry Pi computers :-( Lots of hits when I search for "russian drone raspberry pi". <Ahttps://www.heise.de/en/news/Russian-jet-kamikaze-drone-with-Raspberry-Pi-4-10669801.html> Remotely accessing a GNOME desktop: gnome-remote-desktop? waypipe? Something else?

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(off-topic) bee nest inside brick wall
by William Park 04 Sep '26

04 Sep '26

(off-topic) I have bees inside of exterior brick wall. They are coming/going from the spaces between bricks. Anyone had this? And, how did you get rid of them? - University of YouTube and Google AI say to use "insecticide dust". I couldn't find anything for bees locally, so I bought "ant killing powder" from Canadian Tire. It's been 3 days. Bees are still actively flying about. - I may have to resort to chemical spray. There are 2 types of spray: liquid and foam. Is "foam" better for bees inside brick wall?

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war story: nVidia proprietary driver abandons my system
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 02 Sep '26

02 Sep '26

My old desktop has used a GTX 650 card since 2013. The Nouveau driver just didn't work for my system. I tried it a few times over the years. Unfortunately nVidia's proprietary driver stopped supporting my card, relegating it to the "legacy" driver. That legacy driver does not get along with Wayland and modern Fedora no longer supports X11. Over the years, I had accumulated a bunch of kernel options in the grub configuration, all to stop Nouveau confusing things. I had to remove them. I edited /etc/default/grub and rebuilt grub's config files using grub2-mkconfig. Nouveau seems to be good enough now (but I no longer stress it with a million FireFox tabs). Old (all one line): GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="resume=UUID=6be9f593-abf3-4151-8b0a-8135946edbb4 rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau,nova_core modprobe.blacklist=nouveau,nova_core nvidia-drm.modeset=1" New: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="resume=UUID=6be9f593-abf3-4151-8b0a-8135946edbb4" Unfortunately, grub itself used a video configuration that displayed illegible characters. Again, a change to /etc/default/grub and a grub2-mkconfig Old: GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="console" New: GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="gfxterm" GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768 I tried 1920x1080 but that didn't help. I don't know why. I don't really know why "console" doesn't work or what "gfxterm" is. I got this from <https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/grub-menu-screen-resolution/138544/2>

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How to find a memory leak?
by Giles Orr 24 Aug '26

24 Aug '26

I have a machine running Debian 13 that's used for: - ripping DVDs - ZFS 2x6TB mirror - backing up the contents of my primary machine But for several months it's been unstable. In the last month I've concluded it's got a memory leak. `htop`, `free`, and `stacer` have led me to this conclusion, but none of these seem to be able to tell me what's causing the leak. I've watched the memory gauge in `stacer` go from "5.0GiB of 15.6GiB" to "10.2GiB" used in about 5 minutes - while I was doing nothing on the machine, and `htop` said no processes were active and nothing in particular was using more memory than usual. It would be easiest to blame my home-built version of GNU HandBrake, but the surge of memory usage mentioned above occurred before I ever started `ghb`. So pretty sure it's not that. Could it be ZFS memory caching? Is there a way to check (or control) that? The result is that after about five days the machine is choking because it's trying to swap everything to disk (very slow because spinning disks) and around seven days it dies completely. Prior to this supposed leak, the machine was stable and usable for months at a time, so I'd really love to hunt down and kill this bug ... Any suggestions on how to hunt memory leaks would be much appreciated. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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