July 2025 - Lug-nuts - bigbrie.com

Re: Systemd
by Kevin Brisson 18 Feb '26

18 Feb '26

Gary, computers are hard and shouldn't be used by retired folks. :) Run it like below, it will load last. Use AI for docs - much easier and faster than our brains. Type=idle Behavior of idle is very similar to simple; however, actual execution of the service program is delayed until all active jobs are dispatched. This may be used to avoid interleaving the output of shell services with the status output on the console. Note that this type is useful only to improve console output, it is not useful as a general unit ordering tool, and the effect of this service type is subject to a 5s timeout, after which the service program is invoked anyway. https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.service.html Kevin

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Locale: Not that I'm Paranoid
by Gary 05 Aug '25

05 Aug '25

Somehow, my locale on one of my systems was changed to am_ET.uft8. I might not have noticed, actually. It only obviously broke a few farily minor things. But, I use xdotool scripts with "search --name" parameters and they stopped working. The target of these commands is my Firefox browser. It turns out that Firefox will default to it's "C" locale if it doesn't recognize the locale as set. Everything looked the same, but was in fact different :) After switching the locale back to en_US.utf8, my xdotool scripts worked just fine. It seems to me that resetting the locale in this way could be used for all kinds of attacks. If an attacker could change my locale, I have two questions: How did they do it and what else did they change. It happened on one of my more secure systems where I don't visit weird sites. I was stracing some stuff and used a few related programs and was playing with file descriptors. That may be the culprit too :) I'm going to move this activity to another system, which will be more cumbersome. But, I'd like to keep the affected system relatively secure After forcing Google/Gemini to treat these changes as an attack, it gave me back some pretty generic advice but nothing about a specific attack other than some attacks look at the locale. Just an FYI and seeing if anyone has any experience or thoughts. I found the insideous nature of the effects of the locale change interesting.

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August General meeting Aug 19, at Kupros
by Brian E. Lavender 31 Jul '25

31 Jul '25

Next meeting is social at Kupros Who: you Time: 06:30 PM to 09:00 PM Date: Tue August 19, 2025 Location: Kurpos 1217 21st Street Sacramento, CA 95811 Topic: We will return to Kupros for this meeting. It will be open discussion. Bring your gadgets, questions, and projects that you may be working on. Brian -- Brian Lavender https://www.brie.com/brian/ "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." Professor C. A. R. Hoare The 1980 Turing award lecture

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[kbrisso@gmail.com: Re: Locale: Not that I'm Paranoid]
by Gary 29 Jul '25

29 Jul '25

I did a little reading and I'd be interested in the whole ecosystem: Lucene, Solr, Elastic and how your project fits in and what it does. I'm definitely a "small ball" player at the opposite end of the spectrum from the enterprise folks, but I like to keep in touch :). Besides, I have a lot of files that I am still working on organizing and need to occasionally find. Finding isn't as easy as I would like and cam be stressful. AFA weird sites: Noting that I linked to from another site, nothing where I don't have some kind of other relationship with the owner of the site outside of the internet, nothing used for software development of any kind. Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2025 14:06:23 -0700 From: Kevin Brisson <kbrisso(a)gmail.com> To: Gary <saclug(a)garymcglinn.com> Cc: lug-nuts(a)bigbrie.com Subject: Re: [Lug-nuts] Locale: Not that I'm Paranoid Hi Gary- That is very strange. (you might want to burn the computer) I guess that local is Amharic (Ethiopia) . Tell me more about " visit weird sites. " BTW my Github AI project has 40+ stars! https://github.com/kbrisso/byte-vision Anyone interested in a demo of local document analysis? Kevin Brisson On Mon, Jul 28, 2025 at 11:01 AM Gary <saclug(a)garymcglinn.com> wrote: > Somehow, my locale on one of my systems was changed to am_ET.uft8. I > might not have noticed, actually. It only obviously broke a few farily > minor things. But, I use xdotool scripts with "search --name" parameters > and they stopped working. The target of these commands is my Firefox > browser. It turns out that Firefox will default to it's "C" locale if it > doesn't recognize the locale as set. > > Everything looked the same, but was in fact different :) > > After switching the locale back to en_US.utf8, my xdotool scripts worked > just fine. > > It seems to me that resetting the locale in this way could be used for all > kinds of attacks. If an attacker could change my locale, I have two > questions: How did they do it and what else did they change. It happened > on one of my more secure systems where I don't visit weird sites. > > I was stracing some stuff and used a few related programs and was playing > with file descriptors. That may be the culprit too :) I'm going to move > this activity to another system, which will be more cumbersome. But, I'd > like to keep the affected system relatively secure > > After forcing Google/Gemini to treat these changes as an attack, it gave > me back some pretty generic advice but nothing about a specific attack > other than some attacks look at the locale. > > Just an FYI and seeing if anyone has any experience or thoughts. I found > the insideous nature of the effects of the locale change interesting. > _______________________________________________ > Lug-nuts mailing list -- lug-nuts(a)bigbrie.com > To unsubscribe send an email to lug-nuts-leave(a)bigbrie.com > ----- End forwarded message -----

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Tonight's meeting at Strad Meadery
by Brian E. Lavender 15 Jul '25

15 Jul '25

What is mead? It is honey wine! Tonight's meeting will be at Strad Meadery. 2539 Mercantile Dr. Suite 1 Rancho Cordova, CA 95742 Tuesday, July 15, 2025 6:30 - 8:30pm Topic C# on GNU/Linux. presented by Brian Lavender (me). https://www.saclug.org/articles/2025/july-2025.html Brian -- Brian Lavender https://www.brie.com/brian/ "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." Professor C. A. R. Hoare The 1980 Turing award lecture

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July meeting at Strad Meadery on C# with .Net
by Brian E. Lavender 06 Jul '25

06 Jul '25

We will discuss C# on GNU/Linux. Strad Meadery graciously provided their facility to us for hosting the meeting. July General Meeting When: Tue July 15, 2025 06:30 PM to 08:30 PM Speaker: Brian Lavender Location: Strad Meadery 2539 Mercantile Dr. Suite 1 Rancho Cordova, CA 95742 Brian -- Brian Lavender https://www.brie.com/brian/ "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." Professor C. A. R. Hoare The 1980 Turing award lecture

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Lug-nuts July 2025