The 6-Year Saga of systemd Destroying SSDs: How a "Baseless Claim" Became a Hacker News Front-Page Reality

"Remember in 2020 when yours truly opened systemd issue 15292 showing that 500 KB of text logs turned into 700 MB of SSD thrashing, only to be met with maintainer hostility? The maintainers famously declared "I don't think you know what you're talking about," insisted it was non-actionable, and closed the issue while collecting dozens of angry downvotes from the community. Because why fix an architectural design flaw when you can just insult the user's methodology and pretend write amplification doesn't exist?

Fast-forward six years, and nothing changed—except the frustration. In early 2026, a fresh ticket was filed, proving that writing just two lines of log per second in a virtual machine pushed storage to ~50 IOPS continuously. Systemd's memory-mapped hash tables were still dirtying entire 4 KiB pages, triggering filesystem metadata updates, and churning through gigabytes of I/O for a handful of log entries.

Then came the turning point: the new issue blew up on Hacker News, exposing the sheer absurdity of the years-long denial to the broader tech community. Suddenly, faced with public front-page embarrassment, the maintainers' dismissive wall crumbled. @ValdikSS stepped in with exhaustive isolated cgroup and loop-device benchmarking, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that a single 750-byte log message regularly generates ~50 KB to ~70 KB of underlying disk writes.

Miraculously, once the corporate-backed enterprise maintainers were publicly put on blast, someone on the team finally decided to take a look and start addressing it. It turns out the issue was actionable all along—it just required six years of community pain, a dedicated independent researcher doing the maintainers' profiling for them, and a front-page roasting on Hacker News to make the enterprise overlords care.

This whole saga perfectly distills the systemd experience: a monolithic ecosystem engineered strictly for enterprise container hosts and cloud providers, where real-world desktop and edge hardware constraints are dismissed as "user error" right up until the PR optics become too toxic to ignore."

https://www.reddit.com/r/LinuxUncensored/comments/1vo2hrp/the_6year_saga_of_systemd_destroying_ssds_how_a/

Yet another critical vulnerability in systemd, this time involving snapd. Ubuntu folk are affected.

"A serious security issue has been discovered in Ubuntu, and it is gaining attention in the cybersecurity community. The vulnerability is identified as CVE-2026-3888 and mainly affects Ubuntu Desktop systems from version 24.04 onwards. This flaw is dangerous because it allows an attacker with limited access to gain full root privileges. Root access means complete control over the entire system."

A high-ranking allied diplomat at the United Nations has suspended all official duties after alleging that the international organization is currently preparing for a scenario involving the active use of nuclear weapons against Iran. Mohamad Safa, who has served as the Permanent Representative of the Patriotic Vision Organization (PVA) to the UN for nearly twelve years, issued a public resignation notice on X, claiming he could no longer remain a "witness to this crime against humanity."

The state of the union is strong, if you are an oligarch, a hedge fund, a defense contractor, or a data center. For everyone else, it is a slow emergency packaged as prosperity.

I currently use Ultramarine KDE Plasma, which is a very nicely configured Fedora 43 based distro.

I'm evaluating switching to Bazzite. Simple test: Try to add my wireless Canon printer - works. Try to add my wireless Canon scanner - oops! No scanner software.

Normally I would sudo dnf in skanlite and continue with my day.

On Bazzite, I'm guessing I will sudo rpm-ostree install skanlite ?

But wait, doesn't this involve the dreaded - dun duh daaa - 'layering'? Have I just ruined the precious immutability??

Is it generally OK to add in fedora packages or not??

Confused ...

I have only one Apple device and nothing else. I wanted to update the notifications email for my Apple account.

I open my AppleID in a web page of Safari on my iPhone.

I follow these steps :

1	Log in to appleid.

2	Select "Sign-in and Security"

3	Select"Notification Email" (the defunct email is displayed)

4	Select "Change Email"

5	Enter a new valid email address in the modal popup.

6	Click continue.  The following message is displayed:

"Continue on one of your devices On an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch go to Settings > Apple ID. On a Mac go to System Preferences or System Settings > Apple ID."

When I look in Settings > AppleID ON THE DEVICE there is no option anywhere to change notification email … 🤷🏻‍♂️

People have been posting about this on the official Apple support forum for years with no solution mentioned.

“there were no email addresses in the social security number files*. If you find yourself in this data breach via HIBP, there's no evidence your SSN was leaked, and if you're in the same boat as me, the data next to your record may not even be correct”

https://www.troyhunt.com/inside-the-3-billion-people-national-public-data-breach/

#infosec #privacy

A novel Linux Kernel cross-cache attack named SLUBStick has a 99% success in converting a limited heap vulnerability into an arbitrary memory read-and-write capability, letting the researchers elevate privileges or escape containers.

The discovery comes from a team of researchers from the Graz University of Technology who demonstrated the attack on Linux kernel versions 5.9 and 6.2 (latest) using nine existing CVEs in both 32-bit and 64-bit systems, indicating high versatility.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/linux-kernel-impacted-by-new-slubstick-cross-cache-attack/

https://news.itsfoss.com/crowdstrike-windows-linux/

#infosec

Inequality in Australia is growing and is driven by the rapid accumulation of wealth by the very wealthy.

The wealth of Australia’s richest 200 people nearly tripled over the last two decades. In 2020-21, capital gains exceeded all other types of income combined. Tax reform is needed to address this problem.

#inequality #australia

https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/wealth-and-inequality-in-australia/

iOS App Store seems to have about nine hundred ‘file managers’ all of which are anything but and demand ridiculous subscription costs.

Is there a decent file manager for iOS that actually will do file management things like select multiple file & rename etc that isn’t a scammy subscription/Ad ridden mess?

*Yes, I’m aware Files app is provided by Apple, but it’s extremely basic.

iOS App Store seems to have about nine hundred ‘file managers’ all of which are anything but and demand ridiculous subscription costs.

Is there a decent file manager for iOS that actually will do file management things like select multiple file & rename etc that isn’t a scammy subscription/Ad ridden mess?