Linux, BIOS/UEFI, and Graphics
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The Register UK ☛ systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home
The 256.1 release is now out, containing some 38 minor changes and bugfixes. Among these are some changes to the help text around the systemd-tmpfiles command, which describes itself as a tool to "create, delete, and clean up files and directories." Red Hat's RHEL documentation describes it as a tool for managing and cleaning up your temporary files.
That sounds innocuous enough, right?
It isn't, as GitHub user jedenastka discovered on Friday. He filed bug #33349 and the description makes for harrowing reading, not just because of the tool's entirely intended behavior, but also because of the systemd maintainers' response, which could be summarized as "you're doing it wrong."
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Security Week ☛ Hundreds of PC, Server Models Possibly Affected by Serious Phoenix UEFI Vulnerability
The security hole can be exploited by a local attacker to escalate privileges and execute arbitrary code within the UEFI firmware during runtime.
Eclypsium warned that this is a type of vulnerability that may be leveraged by threats such as the Black Lotus UEFI rootkit.
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Graphics Stack
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Casey Primozic ☛ Computing Normals for "Smooth by Angle" Shading Like Blender
As part of some other work I was doing that involved programmatically manipulating 3D meshes, I encountered the need to compute normals for them from scratch.
Usually this isn't necessary since applications like Blender handle doing this automatically. But in my case, I was doing these transformations dynamically and in the web browser for my Three.JS application. If I wanted normals to shade my transformed meshes, I'd have to compute them myself.
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