Linux kernel ported to the Nintendo 64
A developer ported the Linux kernel to the unusual MIPS hardware of the Nintendo 64 console.
Read the full postBlog 2020
26 posts
Projects, Linux, networks, systems, finds and internet standards from 2020.
The Egg: One life from every perspective
KG animates Andy Weir’s short story about a dead man who learns that every human life is an incarnation of the same maturing consciousness. Andy Weir wrote the short story “The Egg”. Stefan Zisting translated the German version published on Andy Weir’s website.
Read the full postSolarWinds: Trusted updates as a way in
Brian Krebs describes how manipulated Orion updates carried a supply chain compromise to up to 18,000 customers and enabled prioritised follow-up attacks. SolarWinds named fewer than 18,000 Orion customers that might be affected. According to the analysis at the time, manipulated updates had been distributed since March 2020.
Read the full postA small VPN replacement with SSH
Hackaday explains SSH tunnels and TUN devices that make remote networks securely reachable without an additional VPN service. The approach needs a reachable SSH server. Local and dynamic forwarding support different destinations.
Read the full postA chess computer from 1988 as a winter project
Johannes puts a Fidelity Designer 2000 Display that had been unused for decades back into operation and sets himself the goal of beating it. The processor runs at three megahertz. The device dates from around 1988.
Read the full postMicroOS relies on atomic Linux updates
Hackaday tests openSUSE MicroOS, whose transactional updates, Btrfs snapshots and separated applications are meant to keep the system in a robust state. MicroOS comes from the openSUSE project. The system is aimed particularly at container hosts and robust devices.
Read the full postWatching Linux disks with iotop and iostat
Hackaday assesses tools that show process I/O, device throughput, latency and utilisation from different angles. iotop is operated much like top. iostat usually belongs to the sysstat package.
Read the full postPorting a fairseq translation model
Hugging Face documents the transfer of a WMT19 translation model from fairseq to Transformers. The focus is on reproducible weight mapping, tokenisation and identical outputs. The ported system comes from fairseq and was trained for WMT19.
Read the full postUnderstanding transformers as encoder-decoders
The article takes apart encoder-decoder transformers and explains how they differ from pure encoder or decoder models. Cross-attention in particular connects the representation of the input with the step-by-step output. The encoder processes the input sequence bidirectionally.
Read the full postRunning your own Matrix server on Arch Linux
Brendan Abolivier explains Matrix as a federated communication standard and shows how your own homeserver on Arch Linux becomes part of the network. Decentralisation distributes control but increases the demands on operations and moderation. Self-hosting only creates sovereignty with reliable updates, backups and key protection.
Read the full postA fold-out workspace disappears into a PAX
A PAX wardrobe contains a screen, heavy-duty drawer runners and a folding desktop for a complete, hidden home office. The design was created while working from home during the pandemic. Only one PAX drawer was lost.
Read the full postBlock-sparse matrices for smaller language models
The article explains how block-wise sparsity reduces parameters and computation without managing every single zero separately. It combines a structured model format with efficient GPU kernels. Block-sparse matrices store only selected dense sub-blocks.
Read the full postNetwork storage: Amazon cloud cuts off API for backups from NAS
In 2020 Amazon discontinued the programming interfaces for Amazon Drive and Amazon Photos, so that from 1 November NAS systems such as Synology could no longer write backups there. Synology’s Cloud Sync and Hyper Backup were affected, and by the nature of the change other manufacturers such as QNAP as well. Amazon recommended its own apps, which, however, offered no encryption and did not exist for NAS; S3 remained unaffected.
Read the full postWi-Fi routers targeted by hackers
According to Trend Micro, unauthorised login attempts on home routers rose from 23 to 249 million between September and December 2019. Attackers want to take over the devices by brute force and integrate them into botnets for DDoS attacks, especially as more company data moved into home offices. An analysis of 127 routers by Fraunhofer FKIE also showed that many had not received updates for years and ran on very old Linux kernels.
Read the full postKDE Linux desktop: security hole in Ark allowed remote attacks
In 2020 the KDE archive manager Ark contained a path traversal hole (CVE-2020-16116) through which prepared archives could write files to arbitrary locations in the home directory. This could be used, for example, to place a manipulated .bashrc or a script in the autostart folder, but the user had to extract the archive. Ark 20.08.0 prevented this and also issued a warning.
Read the full postRFC 8890: The internet is for end users
RFC 8890 states as a guideline that internet standards should prioritise the benefit and self-determination of end users. Protocol design is never completely value-neutral. Open networks only stay open if user interests are explicitly represented.
Read the full postReformer for long sequences
Reformer reduces the memory and computing requirements of classic transformers through locality-sensitive hashing and reversible layers. This makes much longer inputs possible on limited hardware. Reformer replaces full attention with locality-sensitive hashing.
Read the full postBlocking WordPress brute-force attacks automatically at the hosting edge
Manuel Schmitt announces a free hosting firewall that automatically detects and blocks brute-force attacks on WordPress logins. The firewall was introduced on 1 July 2020. The feature was free of charge and active without manual activation.
Read the full postHow solar storms can hit a technical civilisation
KG explains solar flares and coronal mass ejections and their possible consequences for satellites, radio, navigation and power grids. Space weather becomes an infrastructure risk because technical networks are coupled over large areas. Early warning time only helps if operators have prepared coordinated protective measures beforehand.
Read the full postHow decoding changes the text output
The article compares greedy search, beam search, sampling, top-k and nucleus sampling. It shows that the same model weights produce completely different texts depending on the decoding strategy. Beam search keeps several continuations in parallel and compares their overall probability.
Read the full postWhen security products become a risk themselves
Several cases showed that proprietary security products themselves create new attack surfaces and dependencies.
Read the full postTraining a language model from scratch
Using Esperanto as an example, Hugging Face shows how the tokenizer, data set and transformer are built up from scratch together. The experiment makes visible which decisions finished models usually hide. The example model has six transformer layers and around 84 million parameters.
Read the full postWireGuard merged into the main branch of the Linux kernel
In January 2020 Linus Torvalds merged the net-next branch, and with it the WireGuard VPN, into the main branch of the Linux kernel. This set WireGuard for Linux 5.6 in April, after Jason Donenfeld had proposed it for inclusion the previous summer. The network code comprises only around 7,000 lines, whereas OpenVPN and IPsec run to several hundred thousand.
Read the full postNew projects from old, broken laptops
Old laptops provide displays, cameras, speakers, battery parts and mainboards for several standalone upcycling projects. The original video has the ID WLP_L7Mgz6M. Systematic salvaging turns electronic waste into a sorted parts store.
Read the full postL1DES and VRS make Intel chips vulnerable
In January 2020 Intel disclosed two further variants of Microarchitectural Data Sampling, found by the University of Michigan and VU Amsterdam. With L1DES, alias CacheOut (CVE-2020-0549), data is evicted from the L1 data cache into the fill buffer and can be read there; with VRS, vector registers are affected. Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake and Cascade Lake, among others, were affected, and Intel announced microcode updates.
Read the full postThe tricks with the Google security hole
In early 2020 Trend Micro found malicious apps in the Google Play Store that exploited an Android hole previously used by customers of the spyware maker NSO. Google itself had discovered the hole around a year and a half earlier. The apps Camero and Filecrypt Manager served as droppers and secretly installed the spy app Callcam.
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