Dustin Kirkland
Dustin Kirkland, an Ubuntu and Canonical engineer, writes about Ubuntu features, containers, ZFS, LXD, and security.
What HN says
Commenters repeatedly cite his post 'Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords' as a timeless point, and link his Ubuntu tooling posts.
Stats for nerds
88HN people shared it
59linked in comments
5.4Kstory points
Nov 2022last shared
Top posts on HN
- 1Ubuntu on Windows2 people · 2K points · first shared 2016 · 901 comments on HN
- 2Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords22 people · 1.3K points · first shared 2013 · 255 comments on HN
- 3A Thank-You Note to the Hacker News Community from Ubuntu3 people · 786 points · first shared 2017 · 227 comments on HN
- 4ZFS is the FS for Containers in Ubuntu 16.045 people · 298 points · first shared 2016 · 278 comments on HN
- 5RFC: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Minimal Images1 person · 280 points · first shared 2018 · 115 comments on HN
- 6More people use Ubuntu than anyone actually knows2 people · 136 points · first shared 2015 · 128 comments on HN
- 7The Orange Box: Cloud for the Free Man1 person · 90 points · first shared 2014 · 27 comments on HN
- 8Ubiquiti Networks UniFi Controller in an Ubuntu LXD Machine Container1 person · 88 points · first shared 2016 · 69 comments on HN
- 9Ubuntu Updates for the Meltdown / Spectre Vulnerabilities2 people · 76 points · first shared 2018 · 4 comments on HN
- 10Canonical Livepatch3 people · 65 points · first shared 2016 · 16 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
- wolfgkeJan 2018
> Fingerprinting is treated like the internet's dirty secret, but it's a technology that could be used in different ways. I would prefer this to any of biometric authentication schemes that have been peddled as "passwordless."
Fingerprints (and other biometric data) is the analogue of a (public) username and not the analogue to passwords:
> http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2013/10/fingerprints-are-user-names-not.html
HN discussion:
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8496797
So if you replace entering your username by a fingerprint, retinal scan, ... this is perfectly fine from a security perspective (though IMHO a really bad idea from a privacy perspective). On the other hand using biometric data as replacement for passwords is from a security perspective an anti-pattern.
- kikoreisOct 2016
Hey, Ubuntu/Debian contributor here. Actually, 99% is misrepresenting it. Any [well-packaged] service upgraded through unattended-upgrades (nginx included) gets restarted through package hooks. What unattended-upgrades won't help with are:
1. Updates to the kernel
2. Updates to system libraries which services depend onFor 1, if you run Ubuntu you now have canonical-livepatch: http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/10/canonical-livepatch.html
2 remains a problem, and yes, if you're thinking openssl, that's a problem. But you can track what goes into /var/run/reboot-required.pkgs to see it's really not 99% of fixes we're streaming to you.
See http://askubuntu.com/questions/775504/does-unattended-upgrades-restart-services-automatically/ for a more complete discussion.
- qzncMay 2017
Canonical/Ubuntu has practically stopped innovating for the desktop. There are a few ideas which need a big player, but nobody steps up.
1. Copy update-in-the-background from Chrome OS/Android. If you want to actually improve it, try to provide an undo button (which will never work 100% though). Either use two partitions or disk snapshots for the background system. Do the wake-up-at-night-for-update trick of Android.
2. Turn the snap package system into a real app store. The https://uappexplorer.com/apps is not user friendly. There might even be money in here.
3. Better hardware support. Hopefully they will use Nexus-of-Ubuntu idea from the AskHN thread. http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2017/04/thank-you-note-to-hackernews.html
- hhwMay 2020
It's not about ideological purity, but about respecting the GPLv2.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/
IANAL but Canonical's justification for the ZFS kernel module and Linux kernel being totally separate works, and the distribution itself not being a derivative work of GPLv2 seems dubious to me.
https://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/02/zfs-licensing-and-linux.html
Seeing as how the Software Freedom Conservancy believes this to be a GPLv2 violation, and Oracle could launch a lawsuit as a result of it also being a CDDLv1 violation, I think it's safe to say that it's not just ideological purity that factored into Debian's decision not to include ZFS.
- lathiatAug 2016
That's actually only half the story and mostly not relevant... the dkms package is still there, but ZFS is now shipped with the kernel package:
lathiat@ubuntu:~$ dpkg -S zfs.ko
linux-image-4.4.0-35-generic: /lib/modules/4.4.0-35-generic/kernel/zfs/zfs/zfs.ko
linux-image-4.4.0-36-generic: /lib/modules/4.4.0-36-generic/kernel/zfs/zfs/zfs.koAnnouncement is here:
https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/02/16/zfs-is-the-fs-for-containers-in-ubuntu-16-04/There is a lot of debate about the licensing legality of it, and there are opposing positions from various parties. Here's the official post summarising it: http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/02/zfs-licensing-and-linux.html
- mythzMar 2016
Some choice quotes from: http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.html
"Nope! This isn't a container either. It's native Ubuntu binaries running directly in Windows."
"Oh, and it's totally shit hot! The sysbench utility is showing nearly equivalent cpu, memory, and io performance."
Full access to all of Ubuntu user space inc. apt, ssh, rsync, find, grep, awk, sed, sort, xargs, md5sum, gpg, curl, wget, apache, mysql, python, perl, ruby, php, gcc, tar, vim, emacs, diff, patch...
And most of the tens of thousands binary packages available in the Ubuntu archives.