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Dustin Kirkland
blog.dustinkirkland.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2009
Dustin Kirkland, an Ubuntu and Canonical engineer, writes about Ubuntu features, containers, ZFS, LXD, and security.
What HN saysCommenters repeatedly cite his post 'Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords' as a timeless point, and link his Ubuntu tooling posts.
88HN people shared it
52linked it in comments
59stories submitted
5.4Kstory points
2 years agolast shared
2009people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords22 people · 1.3K points · first shared 2013 · 255 comments on HN
- 2Ubuntu on windows10 people · first shared 2016
- 3ZFS Licensing and Linux6 people · 6 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 4ZFS is the FS for Containers in Ubuntu 16.045 people · 298 points · first shared 2016 · 278 comments on HN
- 5Where We're Going With LXD4 people · 56 points · first shared 2014 · 19 comments on HN
- 6Random Seeds in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Cloud Instances4 people · 41 points · first shared 2014 · 17 comments on HN
- 7A Thank-You Note to the Hacker News Community from Ubuntu3 people · 786 points · first shared 2017 · 227 comments on HN
- 8Canonical Livepatch3 people · 65 points · first shared 2016 · 16 comments on HN
- 9RFC: The New Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Server Installer3 people · 5 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 10Snappy Ubuntu Core3 people · 3 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 11Ubuntu on Windows2 people · 2.0K points · first shared 2016 · 901 comments on HN
- 12More people use Ubuntu than anyone actually knows2 people · 136 points · first shared 2015 · 128 comments on HN
- 13Ubuntu Updates for the Meltdown / Spectre Vulnerabilities2 people · 76 points · first shared 2018 · 4 comments on HN
- 14Dirty COW Was Livepatched in Ubuntu Within Hours of Publication2 people · 8 points · first shared 2016 · 1 comments on HN
- 15Working from Home – Lessons Learned over 20 Years and Shopping List2 people · 5 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
SEJeff · 2021-11-22
Fingerprints are usernames, not passwords. Here is an excellent (and timeless) post on this fact:
https://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2013/10/fingerprints-are-user-names-no…
surki · 2010-08-29
I strongly recommend having a look at the Gnu Screen customization in Ubuntu Server.
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2008/12/ubuntu-server-includes-window-m…
dinom · 2022-11-20
I've been meaning to try Ubuntu's overlayroot package but since I tend to stick with Debian I haven't gotten around to it. Sounds interesting though...
https://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2012/08/introducing-overlayroot-overla…
hhw · 2020-05-02
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.
edelans · 2019-10-03
Indeed, "biometrics are usernames, not passwords".
It reminds me of an old thread :
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2013/10/fingerprints-are-user-names-not…
HN discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11549536
Operyl · 2019-06-15
throwawayReply · 2018-04-10
Fingerprints are usernames, not passwords (2013): http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2013/10/fingerprints-are-user-names-not…
edit: The original headline before being changed, "Web standard brings password-free sign-ins to virtually any site", and contained a paragraph espousing fingerprints in place of passwords.
saurik · 2018-02-13
FWIW, Canonical's legal analysis also concluded the licenses were not incompatible in this instance (though potentially for very different reasons than you do).
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/02/zfs-licensing-and-linux.html
(edit: When I wrote this comment, the person I was responding to had only left a relatively short comment, without the argument or the subsequent bullet points.)
wolfgke · 2018-01-30
> 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…
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.
gshulegaard · 2017-12-12
> It's my understanding that the Ubuntu subsystem in recent windows is sort of a parallel environment ... but is not meant to control the system directly or as an alternate path of interaction with Windows, correct ?
I am not so sure about this. I think Dustin Kirkland sheds some more light here:
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.html
And he seems to be relatively excited about it so he benched it more recently:
https://www.linux.com/learn/howdy-ubuntu-windows-how-fast-it
It seems more like an inverse Wine than a parallel environment.
tristanj · 2017-09-12
The issues raised in the article may explain why Apple just added the ability to passcode-lock your device by pressing the power button 5 times.
Though people have been raising similar issues about biometric identification for years. See this article from back when TouchID was released 2013, titled Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords. http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2013/10/fingerprints-are-user-names-not…
evand · 2017-05-17
That option to automatically install security updates is on by default in Ubuntu 16.04, by the way:
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/10/dirty-cow-livepatched-in-ubuntu…
Snaps were designed from the beginning to push automatic updates, even of non-security updates:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLxqdf89hRo
qznc · 2017-05-11
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.ht…
dustinkirkland · 2017-05-11
Fingerprints are usernames, not passwords.
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2013/10/fingerprints-are-user-names-not…
dragonshed · 2016-10-31
I think the gp was alluding to an argument originally from this blog post [1], which posits that biometrics should only be used to identify, and should never be used to authenticate.
And I'd have to agree, fingerprints are a terrible substitute for a passphrase.
[1] http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2013/10/fingerprints-are-user-names-not…
pbhjpbhj · 2016-10-29
Well, I missed that announcement - http://thehackernews.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows-10.html or http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.html.
Are you "Kirkland", you used the exact same phrasing.
kikoreis · 2016-10-26
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 on
For 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… for a more complete discussion.
lathiat · 2016-08-30
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.ko
Announcement is here:
https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/02/16/zfs-is-the-fs-for-containers-in…
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
shdc · 2016-06-21
fingerprints are usernames, not passwords: http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2013/10/fingerprints-are-user-names-not…
jamesgeck0 · 2016-05-22
Historically, Ruby in general on Windows has not been awesome. But it's not going to matter when the Windows Subsystem for Linux hits stable in a few months.
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.html
ohm · 2016-03-31
TD-Linux · 2016-03-30
The title bar shows bash.exe. So probably not a Linux binary executable, but a Windows port, like Cygwin or msys?
EDIT: Here's another source that claims they are unmodified Linux ELF binaries: http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.html
johnmaguire2013 · 2016-03-30
No, it is not.
> A team of sharp developers at Microsoft has been hard at work adapting some Microsoft research technology to basically perform real time translation of Linux syscalls into Windows OS syscalls. Linux geeks can think of it sort of the inverse of "wine" -- Ubuntu binaries running natively in Windows.
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.html
jonathonf · 2016-03-30
> will I have access to the whole repositories of ubuntu via apt-get
Yes; full, standard, repo access [1].
> With full access to all of Ubuntu user space
> Yes, that means 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!
[1] http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.html?m=1
Delmania · 2016-03-30
See here: http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.html
> Microsoft research technology to basically perform real time translation of Linux syscalls into Windows OS syscalls
mythz · 2016-03-30
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.
jackbravo · 2016-02-18
Here is another post from the parent about this issue specificaly:
- http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/02/zfs-licensing-and-linux.html
"We at Canonical have conducted a legal review, including discussion with the industry's leading software freedom legal counsel, of the licenses that apply to the Linux kernel and to ZFS.
And in doing so, we have concluded that we are acting within the rights granted and in compliance with their terms of both of those licenses."