news
Programming Leftovers
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OpenSSH ☛ urgent security release: 10.6p2
Yes, the control flow should be improved and we'll harden auth-passwd.c against crypt() implementations that do the wrong thing.
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Software Freedom Conservancy ☛ My Keynote at SeaGL and LLM-gen-AI-assisted Reverse Engineering [Ed: GAFAM (e.g. Google) sponsored Software Freedom Conservancy]
Over the past few months, there have been an increasing number of reports of people successfully gaining access to their own devices that were designed to prevent them from installing their own updates and modifications. Nearly every one of these reports notes that an LLM-gen-AI was used. While there are obviously a huge number of issues with LLM-gen-AIs (as we note in our LLM-gen-AI recommendations), it is hard to ignore the benefits to people's digital autonomy that reverse engineering like this brings.
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Rust
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It's FOSS ☛ Systemd Wants Rust in, But its Core Will Have to Wait
The rustification is ongoing, with Rust-written programs now allowed and existing C code not being ported.
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R / R-Script
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Rlang ☛ Shrink stored models with butcher
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Machine Learning in R ☛ Shrink stored models with butcher
Fitted model objects in R often carry more than they need for prediction. A glm object keeps the training data, the fitted values, the residuals, and the environment of its formula. That is fine for a single model. It adds up when resample() or tune() keep one model per resampling iteration with store_models = TRUE.
The butcher package from the tidymodels ecosystem removes these components while keeping the model usable for prediction. This post shows how to apply it to a single learner and how to wrap it in a callback so that every model stored by mlr3 and mlr3tuning gets shrunk right after training.
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Standards/Consortia
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Andreas Fertig ☛ C++26 DIS failed, how does C++ survive?
On October 23, 2026, the unthinkable happened. It was supposed to be a mere formality: C++26 was up for a vote by the ISO National Bodies (NBs). The options are always approval, rejection, or abstention. Comments are also allowed. Since 1998, this process had run quietly and smoothly. Not so on October 23, 2026. After a twelve-week voting period, the result is in: Disapproved!
I would like to mention here that I am a member of the C++ Standardization Committee and, together with my colleagues, represent Germany’s vote. ISO rules also stipulate that certain votes are internal to ISO, and the results—or the breakdown of the results—may not be published. This article contains my own personal views.
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