It's unclear, but it seems like this was someone testing to see if this exploit would really work. From the article:
> The severity was debated - Endor Labs characterised the payload as closer to a proof-of-concept than a weaponised attack - but the mechanism is what matters. The next payload will not be a proof-of-concept.
But it does seem odd not to use an actual payload right away.
I'm in the process of doing something similar but just planning on throwing them on my Immich instance once they're ready (and that lets me share them with other people as well with the Immich account management).
I was under the impression that Ubuntu Touch worked just fine with the Fairphone 5 which is very much not a "7-year-old out-of-production device". I'm currently writing this from a Fairphone 4 (with CalyxOS, not Ubuntu Touch though).
I have quite a decent collection of these and only cancelled my subscription about a year ago. I just didn't read them as much as I once did and couldn't justify the cost. I did love them when I did read them though.
At St Andrews University we have the concept of an “Academic hour” where every class and lecture begins at 5 past and ends at 5 to the hour. So your 10:00-11:00 lecture is actually 10:05-10:55. I believe this is mainly to give people time to get between their classes across town and to standardise how much time one has to set up between lectures.
Can anyone explain why chroot requires root privileges in the first place? Because from my understanding it seems like it should only restrict what you can do rather than grant any new abilities.
nixos.wiki was the primary wiki before NixOS really had an official one. Now there is the official wiki.nixos.org and the NixOS foundation asked the nixos.wiki maintainer to cooperate on the new wiki but they refused. Now there are multiple problems[1] with nixos.wiki and the maintainer in unresponsive so although unfortunately it's ranked higher in search results, in my experience you'll get better information on the official wiki.
For me this feels similar to why I use Helix[1]. I used to use VSCodium and had tried to switch to Vim or Neovim multiple times but didn't manage because of all the plugin configuration to be able to program. Then I saw an HN post about Helix, started it up and it just worked and so haven't used anything else since.
I find the Helix keybindings easier to learn because you see what text will be affected by any operation before you do it. And by using Helix I've found I've been able to pick up Vim keybindings as well so can use it on a server.
I think it would help if it didn't have such a jarring default colour scheme though.
Very nice article, I love posts that go right from the basics and build up to answer the question. And I certainly have a better understanding of DACs as a bonus!
But it does seem odd not to use an actual payload right away.