Rintel: Network Manager 1.2 is here

At his blog, Lubomir Rintel highlights some of the changes found in the new 1.2 release of Network Manager, the network-configuration utility suite shipped by many Linux distributions. High on the list are privacy improvements; the post notes that "the identity of a mobile host can also leak via Wi-Fi hardware addresses. A common way to solve this is to use random addresses when scanning for available access points, which is what NetworkManager now does (with a recent enough version of wpa_supplicant). The actual hardware address is used only after the device is associated to an access point." Network Manager can also now be used to manage tun, tap, macvlan, vxlan and IP tunnel software devices, and can run multiple VPN modules simultaneously. In addition, support for several hardware device classes was split into loadable modules, which will reduce memory overhead.