Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

The shape of things to come?

SiriusXM radio service pushed out an update that expected the infotainment system to be at version x.5. Or whatever. If it wasn't, it rolled back. And therein's the rub. Sirius was unable to revert to its former state, so it tried to download its newest image. Which wasn't compatible with the current state of the infotainment system. Reboot the infotainment system, rinse, repeat.

For some Audi owners, this went on for MONTHS.

I would be seriously pissed if this were to happen to me! Now, my Subaru is 10 years old, and I replaced the radio with a newer Kenwood to get some additional functionality out of Apple's Car Play, and I'm glad I did it. But if I had a newer car with a touchscreen, and it got borked like this? WOW. Very unhappy camper!

The problem was that there are people with car that, for whatever reason, were not running the latest version of their car's infotainment OS. Maybe they had a bad antenna, who knows. Then this APP update comes along and blows everything up. Once again, bad programming that was unable to fail safe and properly revert back to its previous state. I don't know anything about how these infotainment systems are programmed, but you'd think the first thing you'd do when pushing an update would be to read what version is out there - which you can presume is working properly - and write that version identifier off to a safe memory space that won't be overwritten. If your update fails, reload THAT saved version! Then figure out what happened.

*sigh*

https://www.thedrive.com/news/a-siriusxm-update-sent-some-audi-screens-into-a-forced-reboot-loop-for-months

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/10/23/003245/a-siriusxm-update-sent-some-audi-screens-into-a-forced-reboot-loop-for-months

Designed to lure people away from Adobe, they're also offering a very good deal on a perpetual license: apparently $165 for all three packages FOREVER.

The software is Photo, Designer, and Publisher, available for Mac, PC, and iPad. I'm not sure if it's buy once, good for all three platforms, which would be useful for me as I use all three. I don't have time to go over the article right now.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/8/24194281/affinity-creative-suite-six-month-free-trial-deal-announcement

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/07/08/2345250/affinity-tempts-adobe-users-with-6-month-free-trial-of-creative-suite

This is excellent news. Most of Windows is written in C and C++. Those languages have memory problems. Let's use a simple example. There's a programming construct known as an array, it's sort of an indexed list. Let's say we have an array called MyList(10). It has ten elements to it, what's in them doesn't really matter. What happens when you try to reference element 11?

Usually in the C family of languages, you access the memory 'above' the tenth element and what is returned is undefined: we don't know what it will contain. Maybe it overlaps with the password cache, perhaps it has your banking account number in it.

Now, to be fair to C (personally I hate the C/C++ languages, but I firmly believe in 'to each their own'), later versions have better protection against accessing outside array boundaries and things like that which can cause information to leak.

A while back another programming language came to town, Rust. And it is designed, from the clear page, to have memory protection that will prevent access to element 11 and other buffer/memory issues. Which means that code, properly developed! (always a big problem), will theoretically be safer/more secure than C family languages.

Microsoft is now rewriting some subsystems in the Windows operating system into Rust!!!

This is excellent news. The ability to improve security is always a good thing, and this is the first step in doing it. You simply cannot rewrite the entirety of Windows in Rust in one swell foop, but you can rewrite portions of it - letting you see how it works - and progressively get the whole thing redone eventually!

This is now in an Insider edition of Windows 11, meaning it will eventually see the light of day to all users, and should be completely transparent.

In other Rust news, Linux has started rewriting SUDO into Rust. Sudo is a program that lets an account that does not have administrative permission run admin commands if they have the password for it. A fundamental rule of network security, and computer security in general, is to NEVER let your users run their local machines as administrator! Aside from the fact that it gives them far too much control to utterly screw their machine over - and I've seen it! - if your account with admin permissions gets taken over by malware, that's a leverage point to get into the entire network and subvert it!

Speaking as a system administrator, we see far too many programs that won't work if the user is not an administrator on the machine. The normal vendor solution? Make the user an admin. Usually this is caused by the bad coding practice of the developers having admin access on their computers, which really ticks me off. If a software package only runs as administrator, then it's badly written. We can usually develop some selective permissions to make such software work without giving the user admin, but it's always a PITB.

https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/282995/first-rust-code-shows-up-in-the-windows-11-kernel