Phoronix Rolled Out WebP Just as Everyone Needed the Emergency Patch. Also, Pipewire and Google Chrome commentary.
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
Phoronix Rolled Out WebP Just as Everyone Needed the Emergency Patch.
Apparently, “Microsoft Larabel” needs to save pennies on his “articles”, which consist of numerous vendors giving him $100,000 in free hardware (to keep) in one go, praising Microsoft products which are not even Linux, begging people to turn their ad blocker off so that 90% of the screen can be filled with ads and every tracking company and their mother can load something on his pages, and “Now time for a bad lip reading of LKML, with typos.”
At least for stopping by, I got a good laugh when he mentioned “Red Hat multimedia expert Wim Taymans” releasing a version of PipeWire, to “efficiently handle video and audio streams on the Linux desktop.”
Yeah, the only way audio should sound like it did on Fedora 38 was if you’re listening to Robot Rock, by Daft Punk.
I wonder if the new release fixes that.
“Modern” software is bad. Just incredibly bad.
Apparently, Red Hat wasn’t content to break my previously working sound in 2008 with Pulseaudio so they re-implemented all the same bugs and did it again in 2023.
Debian seems to be using Pulseaudio, so maybe “PipeWire” will settle down before I must use it.
Then again, I was reading about how the Flatpak people really want to “deprecate” Pulseaudio now with a “Fallback” permission. *rolls eyes*
It’s pretty bad when IBM is not capable of writing anything good, so you move yourself on over to a distribution using X11 and Pulseaudio so you can ride this out.
Then when you go to Phoronix in LibreWolf with “Web Pee” turned off, you can’t actually see the images because you turned off “Web Pee” in case there were more “surprises”.
Google has a really really good PR team for as truly horrid as their security record is.
While trumpeting sandboxes, “secure design lifecycles”, “fuzz testing”, and “bug bounties, Google has managed to fill Chromium with so much garbage that the list of CVEs are getting longer. This is their worst year yet.
Chrome, which is allegedly so secure, keeps having emergency zero day fixes, and it’s always stuff that shouldn’t be in there to begin with, like WebP (“NIH JPEG”), as well as all this crap, which even made its way into Brave for me to have to turn off.
You cannot tell me there isn’t attack surface here.
Brave is trying to de-fang Chromium, which is supposedly “open source”, but it’s really just a few large companies like Microsoft and Google. That is, clumsy assholes with an adtech business throwing in anything that sounds good (to them)
So there’s a lot of work left for the user even after Brave is done.
I haven’t figured out a way to turn off “Web Pee” yet though. Anyone? █