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Fwd: Re: [ANNOUNCE] WireGuard for FreeBSD in development for 13.y – and a note of how we got here
by Eric Light 27 Mar '21

27 Mar '21

Further to the list conversations about Wireguard and FreeBSD, it looks like things have become much, much worse. Conversation between Jason Donenfeld (Wireguard) and Scott Long (Netgate) below - ew. As LDO mentioned, Netgate don't seem to be particularly friendly members of the open source community :-/ E -------------------------------------------- Q: Why is this email five sentences or less? A: http://five.sentenc.es ----- Original message ----- From: "Jason A. Donenfeld" <Jason(a)zx2c4.com> To: wireguard(a)lists.zx2c4.com, Scott Long <scottl(a)netgate.com> Cc: secteam(a)FreeBSD.org, cperciva(a)FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] WireGuard for FreeBSD in development for 13.y – and a note of how we got here Date: Tuesday, 16 March 2021 14:18 Hi Scott, It's certainly disappointing to receive your email like that. I see that you're really upset, and I think we have a shared interest in deescalating this. You've mentioned the desire to talk about this in public, so I'm responding in the announcement thread to you, as this seems like the appropriate venue for discussion. I've also CC'd the FreeBSD Security Officer. I've responded to your email and its threats in line mailing-list style below: On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 6:08 PM Scott Long <scottl(a)netgate.com> wrote: > What you and Kyle did was tell the world that there are a number of > zero-day exploits in the code. You gave us no details until after the > fact, gave us no time to mitigate, correct, and publish before your > announcement and Kyle's code drop, and used the opportunity to > bash the code, and by extension us, for your own self-gain. I have no idea how you possibly have arrived at this here. FreeBSD 13 is currently at RC2 or RC3, if I recall correctly. Our whole motivation for working on this so tirelessly and with so much energy and devotion over the week was to get things fixed up before 13 was actually released. I dropped everything else I was working on to focus on this. I'm actually with my folks in Colorado and should be spending more time with them but the idea of FreeBSD 13 shipping with all those bugs seemed like a really important thing to address. Here's what we did, step by step: 1. We made a clone of the freebsd git repo where we could all push changes to master, to git.zx2c4.com like everything else. 2. We took turns taking big passes at the codebase, reading it, auditing it, fixing things. We did a lot of syncing and comparison with the OpenBSD code base. For example, in one step, we reordered the functions to match the flow of OpenBSD so we could see it more easily side by side. 3. We kept pushing commits like this in that manner. 4. We didn't know where we'd end up, but after a few days of this, the number of changes we had accumulated and fishy business we had observed was massive. 5. When we thought we reached a good resting point -- and when it became clear that our rapid fire changes were becoming too numerous -- we squashed that down to a summary commit, and Kyle committed it. 6. Seeing that the crypto needed to be re-accelerated, I published a call for help here -- https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2021-March/057076.html 7. I published wireguard-tools with the improved wg(8) command here -- https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2021-March/006493.html 8. I sent a summary of everything to the mailing list here -- https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2021-March/006494.html I also made sure to email a FreeBSD Security Officer, Colin, to keep him posted about the state of this, so he was kept apprised. Again, the whole idea was: two weeks until release! If I suggest the code is just disabled, people will be really upset, so instead we'll try to fix as much as fast as possible before the release. And actually, really focused sprints like that are fun and stimulating. We were all really enjoying writing code until the torrents of anger started coming from you about our efforts. (And I also learned that this isn't the first time you guys tried to intimidate an open source project -- see this summary of the opnSense defamatory website Netgate created -- https://opnsense.org/opnsense-com/ .) And in the process, too, I've tried to be in contact with you and Jim and let you know what our intentions are and to diffuse tensions. I spent time on a video call trying to describe to you some of the security things we found, in case it wasn't possible for you to use the new code right away. I've also made it abundantly clear to you how much I want to work WITH Netgate. When that Reddit thread cropped up, I offered to you multiple times to send a message to it telling people that we've spoken and it looks like you have a good plan and every things going to be okay, but you didn't respond to my offer. On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 6:08 PM Scott Long <scottl(a)netgate.com> wrote: > None > of these actions reflect good-faith collaboration, and your statements > that you think that our work is "really cool" ring hollow. Maybe you > and Kyle are really naive and thought that this was how people > normally collaborate in the security and business worlds, and that > everyone would rush to praise you and shower you with contracts > and funding. And hey, maybe that’ll happen, you certainly have > made a splash. That of course, comes at our expense, and it’s > likely to be a pretty damaging one. Now with the Ars article, I’m > starting to wonder if this was a coordinated smear campaign. > Normally we don’t get this kind of attention. It’s going to be painful > to navigate our way out. I'm not sure how to address these types of... theories. I certainly AM acting in good faith. I can't possibly see how it benefits anybody to have WireGuard and Netgate at odds with one another. You guys make a neat product based on open source software, and I think it's great you're planning to add WireGuard to it. My interest is in making sure the underlying operating system -- FreeBSD 13 -- does that well. (Or, I think you mentioned to me this morning that you're actually planning to base it on FreeBSD 12 for some time, but same idea for the backport you're working on, I guess.) And there's no "smear campaign" -- that's outrageous. I have no idea how that would help anybody at all. I should point out, again to you, how grateful I am that Netgate got the initial work on this started. Had you guys not gotten if_wg rolling, it's not clear to me that it'd exist in the first place. From your end, it's very disappointing that you're (below) planning to attack security researchers and kernel programmers who took the time to rewrite code to make it better, hustling to get it in before FreeBSD 13 is released. On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 6:08 PM Scott Long <scottl(a)netgate.com> wrote: > I’ll be writing an article tonight outlining the mistakes that we made > and what we will be doing to correct it. I’ll also be highlighting that > this incident has been a textbook example of the wrong way for > people to collaborate in the security community, and that extreme > caution should be taken in any future dealings with you. Your > actions are self serving and in bad faith, and your words are > hollow and untrustworthy. I don’t care if you disagree or don’t see > it this way, this is the effect that you’ve had. It makes sense to communicate with your customers about things with your upcoming products if you feel it's necessary. But threatening that you're going to highlight "that extreme caution should be taken in any future dealings with you" sounds to me like a threat of some intense slander. And again, attacking security researchers and kernel programmers who took time to rewrite code to make it better before a release deadline... That's ...wow. I wish you would not go on the attack like that. Instead, it seems like we can both be glad that we're on the path to having better code! And that there's a team of people volunteering to do this and enjoying writing that code. We're all working together to make things better. We worked really super hard on fixing up this code base. It was a LOT of work. And I would like to keep working on it and feeling good about it. So I'm just disappointed that somehow this has devolved for you into making threats like that. On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 6:08 PM Scott Long <scottl(a)netgate.com> wrote: > I’ve also spoken with the FreeBSD Security Officer, and we’ve > agreed that wireguard will be removed from all branches of FreeBSD > until further notice. I’ve also informed Kyle of this. I do not support > its reintroduction into FreeBSD, whether in the src tree or in the > ports tree, at this time. As for pfSense, we are conducting an > audit and will decide on the best course of action for our customers > and our company. I actually think that's a great idea. I was under the impression initially that removing it would be a total non-starter and would just make people upset, hence this hurried mad dash to turn things around. But having an opportunity to take it out of tree and develop it slowly and carefully, like we did for Linux and OpenBSD, sounds a lot better. This also meshes well with what we had planned to do, which I mentioned in the announcement email this morning -- have this available as an out of tree module that people can try out. Then, after we've got it really solid, reintroduce it in the normal FreeBSD ways of doing that. (I'm not so familiar with that latter process, but I trust that Kyle & folks know that part well.) On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 6:08 PM Scott Long <scottl(a)netgate.com> wrote: > > Scott So, that's where we are. You're upset and making threats to slander security researchers and kernel programmers. That's really disappointing. All I can do is ask you: please don't? We have much more to gain by supporting each other than being in conflict. I just want to make sure FreeBSD 13 (or 14) gets a great WireGuard implementation. And you want to make sure your customers get great products. I see no reason why these are conflicting goals. I hope this can deescalate, and we can work together on this. I'm confident that our goals are ultimately aligned very well. Regards, Jason

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WSL start up script
by Matthew Skiffington 26 Mar '21

26 Mar '21

For heathens like me that use the windows linux subsystem (wsl): https://askubuntu.com/questions/978977/windows-subsystem-for-linux-display-… Cheers, Matthew

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Alan Turing On UK £50 Note
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Mar '21

26 Mar '21

The Bank Of England has shown off the upcoming £50 note featuring computing pioneer Alan Turing <https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/25/turing_50_quid/>. The rhyming slang for this denomination is apparently “bullseyes”, but the linked page gives no explanation of the derivation ...

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OpenSSL fixes high-severity flaw that allows hackers to crash servers
by Peter Reutemann 26 Mar '21

26 Mar '21

'On Thursday, OpenSSL maintainers disclosed and patched a vulnerability that causes servers to crash when they receive a maliciously crafted request from an unauthenticated end user. CVE-2021-3449, as the denial-of-server vulnerability is tracked, is the result of a null pointer dereference bug. Cryptographic engineer Filippo Valsorda, said on Twitter that the flaw could probably have been discovered earlier than now. “Anyway, sounds like you can crash most OpenSSL servers on the Internet today,” he added.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/openssl-fixes-high-severity-flaw-th… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Linus Torvalds On Where Rust Will Fit Into Linux
by Peter Reutemann 25 Mar '21

25 Mar '21

'ZDNet article, written by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Linux is the poster-child for the C language. But times change. The Rust language has been slowly gathering support for use as a system language in Linux. For example, at the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference, developers gave serious thought to using the Rust language for new Linux inline code. So, where is it today? I asked Linux's creator, Linus Torvalds, and the Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman for their thoughts. [...] What does Torvalds make of all this? He's in "the 'wait and see' camp -- I'm interested in the project, but I think it's driven by people who are very excited about Rust, and I want to see how it actually then ends up working in practice." "Personally," Torvalds is "in no way "pushing" for Rust, [but] I'm open to it considering the promised advantages and avoiding some safety pitfalls, but I also know that sometimes promises don't pan out." Torvalds thinks "Rust's primary first target seems to be drivers, simply because that's where you find just a lot of different possible targets, and you have these individual parts of the kernel that are fairly small and independent. That may not be a very interesting target to some people, but it's the obvious one." Another point is taking on drivers first for "any initial trials to drivers is simply the architecture side," said Torvalds. "Lots of drivers are only relevant on a couple of target architectures, so the whole issue with Rust code not being supported on some architectures is less of an issue." Kroah-Hartman agrees that "drivers are probably the first place for an attempt like this as they are the 'end leafs' of the tree of dependencies in the kernel source. They depend on core kernel functionality, but nothing depends on them." Torvalds knows some people don't like the idea of Rust in userspace at all. "People complain[ing] about "Rustification" in userspace isn't a great sign for any future kernel use, but hey, we'll see. The kernel is different from userspace projects -- more difficult in some respects (we use a lot of very odd header files that pushes the boundary of what can be called "C"), but easier in many other respects (mainly in the sense that the kernel is fairly self-contained, and then doesn't rely on other projects for the final binary)." From where Kroah-Hartman sits, "it will all come down to how well the interaction between the kernel core structures and lifetime rules that are written in C can be mapped into Rust structures and lifetime rules for drivers in Rust to be able to use them properly. That's going to take a lot of careful work by the developers wanting to hook this all up and I wish them the best of luck."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/21/03/24/2115238 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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GNOME 40 Released
by Peter Reutemann 25 Mar '21

25 Mar '21

'The GNOME 40 desktop update has been released with a bunch of new improvements. Phoronix summarizes the major changes: GNOME 40 is out with the GTK4 toolkit in tow, many improvements and alterations to the GNOME Shell including major changes to the dash and workspaces, Mutter has continued refining its Wayland support, Mutter also added a native headless back-end for testing, atomic mode-setting is now supported, input handling is now done in a separate thread, and a wide variety of other improvements. And, yes, there is also the big shift in GNOME's versioning practices moving forward while still sticking to the same six month release regiment. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/03/24/1957215 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Free software advocates seek removal of Richard Stallman and entire FSF board
by Peter Reutemann 24 Mar '21

24 Mar '21

'Richard Stallman's return to the Free Software Foundation's board of directors has drawn condemnation from many people in the free software community. An open letter signed by hundreds of people today called for Stallman to be removed again and for the FSF's entire board to resign. The open letter said: "Richard M. Stallman, frequently known as RMS, has been a dangerous force in the free software community for a long time. He has shown himself to be misogynist, ableist, and transphobic, among other serious accusations of impropriety. These sorts of beliefs have no place in the free software, digital rights, and tech communities. With his recent reinstatement to the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation, we call for the entire Board of the FSF to step down and for RMS to be removed from all leadership positions." Letter signers include Neil McGovern, GNOME Foundation executive director and former Debian Project Leader; Deb Nicholson, general manager of the Open Source Initiative; Matthew Garrett, a former member of the FSF board of directors; seven of the eight members of the X.org Foundation board of directors; Elana Hashman of the Debian Technical Committee, Open Source Initiative, and Kubernetes project; Molly de Blanc of the Debian Project and GNOME Foundation; and more than 300 others. That number has been rising quickly today: the open letter contains instructions for signing it.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/free-software-advocates-seek-re… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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WiMAX Is Dead
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Mar '21

23 Mar '21

Linux hardware guru Greg Kroah-Hartman is inching closer to dumping all support for WiMAX from the Linux kernel <https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/22/wimax_linux/>. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not missing anything. I remember reading about it in the earliest days of wireless networking: while Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) was about wireless connectivity with mobile endpoints, WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) was designed for connecting between fixed stations. Clearly Wi-Fi can also be used with the latter, though maybe there were some obscure technical reasons why WiMAX was a better fit in the stationary situation. In the early days of Wi-Fi, creative users found ways to transmit it over long distances using high-gain antennas constructed from such low-tech components as Pringles cans. I suspect that Wi-Fi gear, being such a big seller to consumers, was always much cheaper than WiMAX, which is why the latter was never able to gain a foothold.

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Mozilla Firefox Tweaks Referrer Policy To Shore Up User Privacy
by Peter Reutemann 23 Mar '21

23 Mar '21

'Mozilla Firefox will soon include a revised Referrer Policy to tighten up queries and better protect user information. From a report: Firefox 87, due to ship on March 23, will cut back on path and query string information from referrer headers "to prevent sites from accidentally leaking sensitive user data." In a blog post on Monday, developer Dimi Lee and security infrastructure engineering manager Christoph Kerschbaumer said the latest browser version will include a "stricter, more privacy-preserving default Referrer Policy." Browsers send HTTP Referrer headers to websites to indicate which location has 'referred' a user to a website server. Full URLs of referring documents are often sent in the HTTP Referrer header with other subresource requests, and while this may contain innocent information used for purposes including analytics, private user data may also be included. Referrer policies aim to protect this data, but if no policy is set by a website, this often defaults to "no-referrer-when-downgrade," an element that Firefox says does trim down the referrer when navigating to a less secure resource, but still "sends the full URL including path and query information of the originating document as the referrer."' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/03/22/1959256 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Richard Stallman Says He Has Returned To the Free Software Foundation Board of Directors and Doesn't Intend To Resign Again
by Peter Reutemann 23 Mar '21

23 Mar '21

'Richard M Stallman, founder and former president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), announced at the organisation's LibrePlanet virtual event that he has rejoined the board and does not intend to resign again. From a report: Stallman spoke at the event yesterday on the subject of unjust computing -- covering locked-down operating systems, non-free client software, user-restricting app stores, and more. Before the talk he stated: "I have an announcement to make. I'm now on the Free Software Foundation Board of Directors once again. We were working on a video to announce this with, but that turned out to be difficult, we didn't have experience doing that sort of thing so it didn't get finished but here is the announcement. Some of you will be happy at this, and some might be disappointed, but who knows? In any case, that's how it is, and I'm not planning to resign a second time." Stallman resigned both as president and FSF board member in September 2019, saying: "I am doing this due to pressure on the Foundation and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations of what I have said." This followed remarks he made concerning MIT professor Marvin Minsky, who died in 2016, and his association with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Stallman's resignation was welcomed at the time by some prominent free software advocates including GNOME executive director Neil McGovern and FSF sister organisation FSF Europe.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/03/22/1557250 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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