As several LWN readers have pointed out, John-Mark Gurney posted a message to the freebsd-current mailing list on February 17 noting that the random number generator (RNG) in the FreeBSD "current" kernel has been broken for the last four months. "If you are running a current kernel r273872 or later, please upgradeyour kernel to r278907 or later immediately and regenerate keys. I discovered an issue where the new framework code was not callingrandomdev_init_reader, which means that read_random(9) was not returninggood random data. read_random(9) is used by arc4random(9) which isthe primary method that arc4random(3) is seeded from.This means most/all keys generated may be predictable and must beregenerated. This includes, but not limited to, ssh keys and keysgenerated by openssl. This is purely a kernel issue, and a simplekernel upgrade w/ the patch is sufficient to fix the issue."
Opensource.com has an interviewwith John Sullivan, Executive Director of FSF. "I stay involved because I think it's one of the most important social movements in existence, and it needs help—a lot of help. As more and more of the world's social, cultural, economic, and political interactions are mediated by technology, control over the technology becomes incredibly important for the exercise of any basic individual freedoms. I love the people I meet in this work, and the enormity of the challenge."
Bryce Harrington has announcedthe release of Wayland 1.7.0. "The Wayland protocol may beconsidered "done" but that doesn't mean there's not work to be done. This release focused on major improvementsto Wayland's documentation, minor improvements to the testsuite, andsome scattered bugfixes to the code itself."
The Haskell.org site is currently reporting that its Debian packagerepository, deb.haskell.org, has been compromised."`deb.haskell.org` was already offline and suspended shortly afterthese traffic changes were detected by the host monitoring system, meaningthe window for package compromise was very very small. We're continuing toinvestigate the breach and the extent to which it might havespread."
When one thinks about the PHP language, terms like "strong typing" and"strict checking" do not normally come to mind. But, as the project workstoward its next major release (to be called PHP 7), it has becomeembroiled in a fierce debate over the proposed addition of some simpletyping features to the language. To some, PHP is growing up into a safer,better-defined language, while others see the changes as possiblydestroying the character of a historically freewheeling language.Click below (subscribers only) for the full article.
Do you have an opinion on whether the next kernel release should be called3.20 or 4.0? Linus is currently running apoll on Google+ to get a sense for what people would prefer. "So- continue with v3.20, because bigger numbers are sexy, or just move tov4.0 and reset the numbers to something smaller?"As of this writing, the 4.0 option appears to be winning.
Over at Linux Journal, Joey Bernard looks at Distro Astro, which is a Linux distribution for astronomy. It collects programs of interest to those running telescopes and planetariums, including various image collection and processing applications."After aiming your telescope, you need to collect some images or do some astrophotography. While you can do some of this with software like KStars, you have software specifically designed to do image capture. Some, like wxAstroCapture, are specifically written for use in astronomy. With it, you can set up automatic guiding and batch image collection. You then can go have a nice hot cup of coffee while your telescope collects your data. To help you keep track of all of these observations, you can use the Observation Manager, a logging program to maintain your records."
The free-software community has frequently advocated thedevelopment of new decentralized, federated network services—forexample, promoting XMPP as an alternative to AOL Instant Messenger,StatusNet as an alternative to Twitter, or Diaspora as an alternativeto Facebook. The recently launched Matrix project takes on a different service: IRC-like multi-user chat.
CentOS has updated kernel (C5: denial of service) and subversion (C7; C6: multiple vulnerabilities).Debian has updated ruby1.8 (denial of service).openSUSE has updated krb5 (13.2:multiple vulnerabilities) and xen (13.2: multiple vulnerabilities).Oracle has updated subversion (OL7; OL6: multiple vulnerabilities).Red Hat has updated chromium-browser (RHEL6 Supplementary:multiple vulnerabilities), kernel (RHEL5: denial of service), and subversion (RHEL7; RHEL6: multiple vulnerabilities).Scientific Linux has updated kernel (SL5: denial of service), shim (SL7: multiple vulnerabilities), and subversion (SL6: two vulnerabilities).Ubuntu has updated krb5 (multiplevulnerabilities) and oxide-qt (14.10,14.04: multiple vulnerabilities).
Last week the Red Hat developer blog looked at some changes coming with GCC5.This week's articlecovers how those changes will be handled in Fedora. "One consequence of this decision will be that Fedora 22 and Fedora 23 will both have GCC 5, but they’ll be fundamentally different. The C++ library (libstdc++.so) will becompatible between F22 and F23 (in fact, it will be almost exactly the same,modulo some extra patches from upstream that might be pulled into the later F23 build). The difference will be all the other DSOs that link to it. That’s important for Fedora developers to note.Specifically, FESCo’s decision means the C++ standard library headers installed by thelibstdc++-devel RPM will have a different default value for the _GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI macro (0 in F22 and 1 in F23) but the libstdc++.so library will be largely the same in F22 and F23, because that library contains all the symbol definitions for both the old ABI and the new ABI, so that the same library works for both cases."
Version8 of the ownCloud server is available. "This new release bringsimproved sharing and collaboration between clouds and introduces fasterways of getting at your files with favorites and improved search."See the feature page for details.
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