Linux, and picking up dirty socks

Normally considered fairly secure, Linux has a newly discovered and serious kernel bug affecting versions between 5.14 and 6.6.14. The vulnerability is in a kernel framework that handles network operations such as packet filtering, network address translation, and port translation. Like many computer operations, these are dynamic. As traffic and connections come and go, memory is assigned, used for a while, then freed. Dynamic memory handling is necessary, but can be a minefield.

For instance, code written in the Java notation handles this sort of thing automatically. When its memory manager determines an object is no longer "in the scope" of (no longer needed by) the currently running code, it returns the memory to the system. The program needs no code to handle this. In many other languages this is not the case. Programmers writing in C++ often forget to write code freeing up dynamic memory when their program is finished with it. Busy programs running for long periods of time eventually use up all the available memory and crash.

For his programming languages class, the Spy puts it this way: "Java will pick up your dirty socks, but C++ is not your mom and will leave them where they are till you run out of socks.

Such memory leak bugs can be found in even the most commonly used and prestigious programs, including Excel. The fix for it: after every hour or two of work (more often if memory is low), save all open Excel files, quit, run the program again, re-open the files and continue.

In the Linux case, a bad actor may be able to obtain access to dynamic memory, so that after it has been freed, it can be employed to run malicious code, possibly giving the hacker root level control of the entire computer. Oopsie.

Apple

has a few current issues. (When does a behemoth not?) By all reports the foldable phone idea is on hold. Apparently folds are not folding well. One does not need creases in one's screen.

There are also reports of a bug in iOS 17.5.1, with iPhones dropping Wi-Fi connections. The Spy confirms there is an issue, possibly the same one, because in parts of his home where the signal is weak, his phone suddenly refuses to connect. He now has to walk out of his office into the family room to deposit a cheque remotely, or perform any other function not also available on his computer. He does not buy data with his phone plan, because he's always spent his working days where Wi-Fi was available, and who needs it while driving?.

But that's not all. On his iPhone, Zoom, Bluetooth, and his Philips hearing aids no longer work together seamlessly. To access Zoom audio via his hearing aids for the first time on any given day, he must go to settings, disable Bluetooth, wait twenty seconds, then re-enable it. Only than will the audio reliably feed from Zoom through Bluetooth to his ears--a good old computing fix. Turn it off and on again. It might just work. The Spy needs this to get the English translation via Zoom of Romanian sermons at the church he secondarily attends on Sunday afternoons in addition to his own in the morning. He doesn't want his phone blaring through its speaker and disrupting everyone around him, and the headsets provided by the church are much less comfortable and the sound of lower quality. Expensive hearing aids need to pull their weight.

Routers

are essential to make the Metalibrary (Internet) work. They connect devices in a home or office to each other by using their IP addresses to route information packets from one machine to another and back, possibly located in the next room, several floors up in the office tower, or on the other side of the world. Successive data packets it handles may be between the same two machines, or two different ones. They may perform other functions such as securely fire-walling out malicious data packets, preventing the outside world from seeing what devices live beyond the router, caching route information to speed up communication, running different local networks for various purposes, and more.

It just became public that an Internet provider (reportedly Windstream) using ActionTec T3200 model home office/small office routers had 600 000+ of them bricked by an as yet unidentified hacker in a seventy-two hour period back in October 2023. Routers do occasionally croak often when their address caching software goes awry and "poisons" the cache. Typically, power off; power on to reboot, and all is well till the next time. In this incident, the routers were permanently bricked and had to be replaced. No motive is known for the attack. At that scale, this was no mere bug; it was a swarm of locusts destroying all in its path.

Google,

faced with reports of bizarre and often false results from its buggy AI Overview engine has rushed out revisions because of what they euphemistically termed "some odd, inaccurate" results. However, intriguing as the premise of generative AI may seem, the way it is being implemented remains fundamentally flawed, its answers often sheer nonsense if not entire fabrications. Consequently, the albeit eloquent results will frequently continue to be worthless. AI can also produce racist speech as vile as any other hate peddler. Why these "bugs"? Any AI that draws on the Internet as a whole for its data is bound to produce results consistent with its sources--faithful offspring of the nonsensical, contradictory, extremist, misleading, or outright false so common there.

The Spy featured an AI character named Alicia in the first edition of his ethics text written in the late 1980s (but set in the early 2000s) and a decade later fleshed out the idea further in his ten (so far) Alternate History Science Fiction novels. The key to doing it right then, and still is, that the data provided to the AI must be curated. Of course, that isn't enough, for it kicks the problem can down the road by demanding the supplementary question: "Who curates the data?" One could build equally eloquent AIs that are even-handed, poisonously biased, or pathological liars--just like we humans can be.

The Spy's Alicia is a cluster computer with a vast store of academic data, including the literary, linguistic, educational, and scientific, but that has no access to the Internet. (True, the Internet did not yet exist at the time of first writing, but like others in the field, the Spy assumed it would soon be invented, and termed the universal collection of all knowledge and publications of every kind and in all media, together with its universal electronic access tools, civilization's Metalibrary--instantiated as what is now called an "internet" but on steroids.)

Sorry, but when we the people have trouble rightly dividing truth from lies, and too often prefer the latter, an AI drawing from everyone's data and programmed by we same flawed humans, can scarcely be expected to do better at discerning or communicating truth than we do.

Canadian Politics

have their own buggy malfunctions, for they are a maelstrom of contradictions and festering divisions--albeit this country fortunately lacks the pervasive extremes of our southern neighbour, and instead for the most part sleepwalks through the rule of whatever party leader is currently in control. We eventually and suddenly awaken to a current government's hubris and mismanagement long enough to elect whatever "throw the bums out" alternative party happens to be at hand, subsequently returning to somnambulism while giving the new bunch a couple of terms, then repeating the cycle, all without seeming to notice that political differences in this country are usually more for show than of substance. (Wow. On review, that last sentence is sufficiently run-on to compete with the Apostle Paul. At least it wasn't written by an AI, which The Spy is not...hethinks. Apologies to Descartes.)

British Columbia is currently ruled by a party with socialist roots that, with the exception of the occasional favourable tilt to the labour laws as a lucrative handout to its union friends, governs in the middle of the road with surprising and unhistorical moderate competence. Very conservative neighbouring Alberta once puts its own nominally socialist party in power for a brief time, and perforce, it governed well to the right of the conventional centre for the most part. An Alberta socialist would be called a conservative elsewhere in Canada. And yet, although Alberta was in the past sometimes termed "Texas North" that could hardly be said today, and not because Alberta has much changed.

Meanwhile, to aspire to government in Quebec, political parties must at least pretend to be separatist to extract from the national government every iota of tax and sovereignty transfers for itself at the expense of the rest of the country. The Spy once asked a Quebec government deputy minister what would become of the rest of Canada if Quebec separated. His answer: "Who cares? It's a foreign country." Meanwhile, while we two were attending the same meetings in Ottawa, he would neither eat nor sleep in the city (which is in Ontario in case the Spy's reader does not know) but went back across the river to Quebec for both meals and his hotel. One evening I bought him dinner at his favourite restaurant in Gatineau and we had a great discussion about two gospels--his party's was one. It was good food, for both the stomach and the mind.

Back to Ottawa, Canada's national government has for most of Canada's century-and-a-half been ruled by the "Liberal" party whose representatives in the capital often seem to believe they have divine authority either to do as they please, whether it makes a shred of logical, fiscal, or ethical sense, as in progressively defunding defence, thus dangerously shirking Canada's duty to the shrinking "free" world, or skewing taxes to favour regions that might vote for them at the expense of those they know will not. Its current leader has somehow managed to survive repeated scandals of accepting luxury vacations from ultra rich friends--something that in most government contexts would be career ending.

Will the bunch that replaces the now deeply disliked drama king cum gadfly Prime Minister and his supporting cast after the next election be any better? Hope springs; history dismays. The Spy does not like appearing a cynic on such matters, but can no longer in good conscience belong to any political party, and in future only might vote for an individual candidate he personally knows and can abide.

30000 lies under the seal

His dilemma would be far worse if he lived twenty kilometres farther south in the Excited States. After Trump's presidency, the Washington Post's catalogue of his verifiable falsehoods totaled 30 573, a number that by 2024 has likely doubled or tripled, not counting the fibs he has put into the mouths of his lawyers and proud fanboys. (A convicted felon, rapist, and payer of sex hush money to get elected surely has few fangirl trumpetes.)

At a criminal trial, the defendant who pleads not guilty, perhaps hoping for a mistrial or an appealable error by prosecutors or the judge, verbally maintains a façade of innocence even in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt, but few have the temerity to slander the prosecuting staff, the judge, and his family, or claim without a shred of evidence or logic that the trial was ordered by the now sitting president and is a politically motivated sham.

Most defendants found guilty of crimes, express a degree of remorse, at least during the required probation interview, (which he ignored). Never before in American history has a President, former President or presumptive nominee for the office been a convicted felon. Has any other person aroused militant hatred for others, and fanatical loyalty for himself to raise millions in donations upon thirty-four felony convictions? Do the words "Lock Him Up" have an eerie ring of déjà vu all over again? .

Is this verdict evidence that the American justice system works impartially, or to the contrary, is the pushback a harbinger of bug-ridden catastrophe, revealing a clear and present danger of the disUnited States being dismantled for a brutal autocracy, or boding a fracturing of that once great nation into a disparate collection of separate and possibly warring little two-bit countries. Respectful dissent, once the lynchpin of democracy, seems to be being criminalized in the minds of too many in a polarized populace

The Putins, Xis, and Kims of the world must be laughing up their sleeves, even as they foment ever greater discord in and between "democratic" nations while plotting to remake the world in their image—a collection of brutal dictatorships where dissent means you die either in a mysterious "accident", by being beaten to death in prison, worked to death in a gulag/concentration camp, or handed a gun and uniform, to become cannon fodder in the glorious regime's latest war of conquest.

RNC members with bees in their bonnets over unrelated immigration issues played political games to delay aid to Ukraine, thereby already permitted Putin to steal more territory from his neighbour and put the very existence of that country in peril. After they lose all three branches of government in the next election, and assuming there is anything left standing after the resulting insurrection, will they come to their senses and embrace truth and sound government under new leadership? Somehow, it seems unlikely. Will the other major party suddenly discover fiscal and social responsibility? That seems equally improbable.

We live in

a bug filled, even broken world, and it is our own fault. We ourselves program the bugs in our machines, our software, our political systems, and our own thinking. Grace Hopper's famous note seems appropriate. There is a bug in the system. Indeed there are many, but there is a non-politician who is the Remedy.

--The Northern Spy

Opinions expressed here are entirely the author's own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe, (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is professor of Computing Science and Mathematics and Assistant Dean of Science at Canada's Trinity Western University. He completed his fifty-third year as a high school and university teacher in 2023. He has been involved as a member of or consultant with the boards of several organizations and participated in developing industry standards at the national and international level. He was co-author of the now defunct Modula-2 programming language R10 dialect project. He is a long time technology author and has written two textbooks and ten alternate history SF novels, one named best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His various columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (dead tree and online formats) since the early 1980s, and he's been a regular participant and speaker at churches, schools, and academic meetings and conferences. He and his wife Joyce celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2019 and lived in the Langley/Aldergrove/Bradner area of B.C. from 1969 to 2021 and cancer, where he latterly continues alone, depending heavily on family and friends to manage.

URL s for Rick Sutcliffe's Arjay Enterprises:

The Northern Spy Home Page: https://www.TheNorthernSpy.com

opundo : https://opundo.com

Sheaves Christian Resources : https://sheaves.org

WebNameHost : https://www.WebNameHost.net

WebNameSource : https://www.WebNameSource.net

nameman : https://nameman.net

General URLs for Rick Sutcliffe's Books:

Author Site: https://www.arjay.ca

TechEthics Site (Fourth edition of text; the fifth is in preparation) : httpss://www.arjaybooks.com/EthTech/index.htm

Publisher's Site: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Richard-Sutcliffe.html