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@gmail.com To: Gary saclug@garymcglinn.com Cc: lug-nuts@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@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@bigbrie.com To unsubscribe send an email to lug-nuts-leave@bigbrie.com

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