Everything seems ok. It is unlikely that the disk itself is dying. Maybe the problem is a bad cable or bus controller. Or something is wrong with the filesystem.
bizdelnick
It's not GTK, it's tk.
Check its SMART: smartctl -a /dev/sdb
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Software opens a symlink the same way as a regular file. The kernel reads a path stored in a symlink and then opens a file with that path (or returns a error if unable to do this for some reason). But if a program needs to perform specific actions on symlinks, it is able to check the file type and resolve symlink path.
To determine how some specific software handle symlinks, read its documentation. It may have settigs like "follow symlinks" or "don't follow symlinks".
Because nobody can be sure there are no other backdoors. And, I guess, they wanted to stop distribution of affected source code.
Nope. There were checks of build environment.
Anyway the xz backdoor was enabled only in rpm and deb packages.
Have you ever upgraded debian? If both local config and default config have changed, it suggests you review the changes and choose which config to use or merge it manually.
I don't know for sure, it depends on changes in the liblzma API. If there were any changes (backward compatible or not, usually nobody cares about forward compatibility), yes, recompiling is required.
So you need to downgrade to even earlier version. Best of all, use a fork created by Joey Hess.
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