Fedora 23 beta has been released. "Fedora 23 includes a number ofchanges that will improve all of the editions. For example, Fedora 23 makes use of compiler flags toimprove security by "hardening" the binaries against memorycorruption vulnerabilities, buffer overflows, and so on. This is a"behind the scenes" change that most users won't notice throughnormal use of a Fedora edition, but will help provide additionalsystem security." The final release is scheduled for late October.Fedora 23 beta is also available forAARCH64 and POWER architectures.
Arch Linux has updated flashplugin (multiple vulnerabilities).Debian has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).Debian-LTS has updated linux-2.6 (multiple vulnerabilities).Fedora has updated icedtea-web(F21: applet execution).Mageia has updated flash-player-plugin (MG5: multiple vulnerabilities).openSUSE has updated bind (13.2,13.1: denial of service), criu (13.2: twovulnerabilities), icedtea-web (13.2, 13.1:multiple vulnerabilities), libgcrypt (13.2,13.1: information disclosure), and python-django (13.1: multiple vulnerabilities).Red Hat has updated flash-plugin(RHEL5,6: multiple vulnerabilities).SUSE has updated kernel(SLE11SP3: multiple vulnerabilities).
As the introduction to Tom Herbert's kernelconnection multiplexer (KCM) patch set notes, TCP is often used formessage-oriented communication protocols even though, as a streamingtransport, it has no native support for message-oriented communications.KCM is an effort to make it easier to send and receive messages over TCPwhich adds a couple of other interesting features as well.Click below (subscribers only) for the full story from this week's KernelPage.
The Free Software Foundation Europe and Open Invention Network, with theparticipation of the Legal Network and the Asian Legal Network, arepresentingtwo round table events with presentations and panel discussion ofindustry and community speakers, titled "Open Source and Software PatentNon-Aggression, European Context". The events will be held in Berlin,Germany on October 21 and in Warsaw, Poland on October 22.
The second 4.3 prepatch is now availablefor testing. "As has beenthe trend for a while now, rc2 tends to be reasonably small, probablybecause it takes a while for regression reports to start trickling in(and some people probably actively wait for rc2 to even start testing- you scaredy-cats, you)."
Version 2.3.0 of the GeoClue geolocation service has beenreleased. The most notable change in this update is support for sharingand accessing GPS devices over a network connection. Aproof-of-concept implementation of this feature is available in theGeoclue Shareapp for Android, which lets users relay GPS data from their device toa GNOME desktop system. Other new features include support fordigital compasses and updated documentation.
Version 1.3 of the Rust language has been released.The announcement listed API stabilization and increased performance work asthe most notable changes. Specifically, there is a newsubstring-matching algorithm, a faster zero-filling methodfor initializing and resizing vectors, and speed-ups to theRead::read_to_end function. The releasenotes provide more detail. Also new in this release is the firstedition of a new Rust programming guide, the Rustinomicon.
Bryce Harrington writes about thecurrent and future state of Wayland. "A lot of people areanticipating Wayland on their desktops. For now, we remain in a holdingpattern while the DE developers roll out their Wayland support, but some ofthese efforts are reasonably mature enough now. The question starts tobecome whether there is an adequate ecosystem of Wayland enabled clientapplications. For things that can’t simply be moved to Wayland, thequestion is if Xwayland will be up to snuff. Exploring this space will takesome pioneering spirits."
Debian's decision to move to systemd as the default init system wasa famously contentious (and rather public) debate. Once all the chaosregarding the decision itself had died down, however, it was left toproject members to implement the change. At DebConf 2015 inHeidelberg, Martin Pitt and Michael Biebl gave a down-to-earth talkabout how that implementation work had gone and what was still ahead.
Last week we reported that the KiltonPublic Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire suspended its Tor node deploymentdue to criticism by the local police department. Ars Technica nowreportsthat the Tor relay has been restored. "As Ars reported earlier, the goal of the Library Freedom Project is to set up Tor exit relays in as many of these ubiquitous public institutions as possible. As of now, only about 1,000 exit relays exist worldwide. If this plan is successful, it could vastly increase the scope and speed of the famed anonymizing network. For now, Kilton has a middle relay but has plans to convert it to an exit relay. A middle relay passes traffic to another relay before departing the Tor network on the exit relay."
There are various types of random number generators (RNGs) that targetdifferent use cases, but a programming language can only have one default.For high-security random numbers (e.g. cryptographic keys and the like), itis a grievous error to use the wrong kind of RNG, while other use cases aretypically more forgiving. The Python community is in the middle of adebate about how it should be handling random numbers within the language'sstandard library.<p>Click below (subscribers only) for the full report.
CentOS has updated kernel (C7:multiple vulnerabilities).Debian has updated icu (denial of service).Fedora has updated moodle (F22; F21: multiple vulnerabilities).Oracle has updated kernel (OL7:multiple vulnerabilities) and qemu-kvm(OL7: information leak).Red Hat has updated kernel(RHEL7: multiple vulnerabilities), kernel-rt (RHEL7; RHEMRG:multiple vulnerabilities), and qemu-kvm(RHEL7: information leak).Scientific Linux has updated kernel (SL7: multiple vulnerabilities) and qemu-kvm (SL7: information leak).
A bit far afield, perhaps, but Lawrence Lessig is the co-founder ofCreative Commons and a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyrightand trademark. Ars Technica talkswith Lawrence about his bid for the US presidency."Ars: Does your copyleft past help or hurt your presidential bid?Lessig: Whatever you call it, I have the right position on copyright—namely, that it is essential, but needs to be updated to the digital age. If people want to challenge that position, then I’d have to make fair use of the words of Harry Callahan: “Go ahead, make my day.â€"
The Linux Plumbers Android microconference was held in Seattle on August20th. It included discussions of a variety of topics, many of whichneed to be coordinated within the Android ecosystem. The microconferencewas split up into two separate sessions; this summary covers the secondsession, which was held for three hours in the evening. Topics were toyboxin Android, improving AOSP vendor trees, providing per-task quality ofservice, and improving big.LITTLE on Android.
The Python 3.5.0 release is out. "Python 3.5.0 is the newest version of the Python language, and it contains many exciting new features and optimizations." See the what's newpage and this LWN article for detailson the new features in this release.
Linus has released 4.3-rc1 and closed the4.3 merge window one day ahead of the usual schedule. "I decidedthat I'm not interested in catering to anything that comes in tomorrow, andI might as well just close the merge window and do the -rc1release." In the end, 10,756 non-merge changesets were pulledduring this merge window.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is running a storyon its DeepLinks blog that the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, NewHampshire has suspended its Tor node deployment—at leasttemporarily—due to criticism by the local police department (wecovered the launch of the Kiltonlibrary's Tor node in August). The EFF post says that the criticismoriginated when "a regionalDepartment of Homeland Security office contacted the local policeto spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Tor. The police got intouch with the library board, who suspended the program until theycould vote on it on September 15." The EFF has set up a pageat which interested parties can sign a petition showing support forthe library, and has written its own letter of support to the Lebanonlibrary board. The Library Freedom Project, which is handling thedetails of running Kilton's Tor node, has also writtenabout the incident and promises further updates after the libraryboard meeting.
The OpenWrt 15.05 release is out. This release includes a number of newfeatures, including improved package signing, support for hardened buildsand jails, a lot of new hardware support, and much more. (See also: LWN's review of the 15.05 release from July).
On his blog, QEMU developer Amit Shah gathered up information on the recent QEMU 2.4 release from the maintainers. It takes the form of a video made at KVM Forum, as well as some email comments from those who were not present. "Many contributors to the QEMU and KVM projects meet at the annual KVM Forum conference to talk about new features, new developments, what changed since the last conference, etc.The QEMU project released version 2.4 just a week before the 2015 edition of KVM Forum. I thought that was a good opportunity to gather a few developers and maintainers, and get them on video where we can see them speak about the improvements they made in the 2.4 release, and what we can expect in the 2.5 release."
Debian has updated libvdpau(three vulnerabilities).Debian-LTS has updated bind9(denial of service).Fedora has updated bind (F22:denial of service).SUSE has updated qemu (SLE12: twovulnerabilities).
Some languages pride themselves on providing many ways to accomplish anygiven task. Python, instead, tends to focus on providing a single solutionto most problems. There are exceptions, though; the creation of formattedstrings would appear to be one of them. Despite the fact that there are(at least) three mechanisms available now, Python's developers have justadopted a plan to add a fourth. With luck, this new formatting mechanism (slated for Python 3.6) willimprove the traditionally cumbersome string-formatting facilities availablein Python.
Opensource.com takesa look at the AXIOM Beta camera, a new professional digital imagecapturing platform. "The goal of the AXIOM camera, and theglobal-community-driven apertus° project, is to create a variety ofpowerful, affordable, open source licensed and sustainable digital cinematools. The apertus° project was started by filmmakers who felt limited bythe available proprietary tools. AXIOM Beta will provide full and opendocumentation, the ability to add new features and change the behavior ofexisting features, and the option to add custom accessories." AXIOMBeta is intended primarily for software and hardware developers.
Samba 4.3.0 is out. This release has a lot of new features, including areworked logging system, a new FileChangeNotify subsystem, better trusteddomains support, SMB 3.1.1 support, and more.
Jono Bacon interviewsJohn Sullivan, executive director of the FSF, at Opensource.com."What we have been focusing on now are the challenges I highlighted in the first question. We are in desperate need of hardware in several different areas that fully supports free software. We have been talking a lot at the FSF about what we can do to address this, and I expect us to be making some significant moves to both increase our support for some of the projects already out there—as we having been doing to some extent through our Respects Your Freedom certification program—and possibly to launch some projects of our own. The same goes for the network service problem. I think we need to tackle them together, because having full control over the mobile components has great potential for changing how we relate to services, and decentralizing more and more services will in turn shape the mobile components."
The Linux Plumbers Android microconference was held in Seattle on August20th and looked at a number of topics needingcoordination between various players in the Android ecosystem. It was splitup into two separate sessions; this summary covers thefirst three-hour session.Topics covered the state of the staging tree, USB gadgets and ConfigFS,running mainline on consumer devices, partitions and customization, asingle binary image for multiple devices, Project Ara, and kdbus.<p>Click below (subscribers only) for the full report from LPC 2015.
It's time to figure out who will be organizing the Linux PlumbersConference in 2016, which is planned to be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, atthe beginning of November, alongside the Kernel Summit. Interestedorganizers should put together a bid and submit it to the LinuxFoundation's Technical Advisory Board by October 5; see this page for details onhow the process works. "This is your chance to putyour stamp on one of our community's most important gatherings in ayear when we will be celebrating 25 years of the Linux kernel."
The Mozilla blog has disclosedthat the official Mozilla instance of Bugzilla was recentlycompromised by an attacker who stole "security-sensitiveinformation" related to unannounced vulnerabilities inFirefox—in particular, the PDFViewer exploit discovered on August 5. The blog post explains thatMozilla has now taken several steps to reduce the risk of futureattacks using Bugzilla as a stepping stone. "As an immediatefirst step, all users with access to security-sensitive informationhave been required to change their passwords and use two-factorauthentication. We are reducing the number of users with privilegedaccess and limiting what each privileged user can do. In other words,we are making it harder for an attacker to break in, providing feweropportunities to break in, and reducing the amount of information anattacker can get by breaking in."
The Linux Test Project (LTP) has made a stable release for September 2015. The previous release was in April. This release has a number of new test cases including ones for user namespaces, virtual network interfaces, umount2(), getrandom(), and more. In addition, the network namespace test cases were rewritten and regression tests have been added for inotify, cpuset, futex_wake(), and recvmsg(). We looked at writing LTP test cases back in January.
Arch Linux has updated bind (twodenial of service flaws).CentOS has updated bind (C7; C6; C5: denial of service), bind97 (C5: denial of service), andlibXfont (C7; C6: three privilege escalation flaws).Debian has updated bind9 (denialof service), qemu (multiplevulnerabilities), and qemu-kvm (two vulnerabilities).Debian-LTS has updated openslp-dfsg (three vulnerabilities, one from2010, another from 2012).Red Hat has updated bind (RHEL6,7; RHEL5: denial of service), bind97 (RHEL5: denial of service), and libXfont (RHEL6,7: three privilege escalation flaws).Scientific Linux has updated bind (SL6,7; SL5:denial of service), bind97 (SL5: denial ofservice), and libXfont (SL6,7: threeprivilege escalation flaws).Slackware has updated bind (twodenial of service flaws).SUSE has updated bind (SLE12; SLE11SP2,3,4: denial of service), kernel (SLE11SP2: multiple vulnerabilities,three from 2014), and xen (SLE11SP3;SLED11SP3: multiple vulnerabilities).Ubuntu has updated bind9 (denialof service).
Debsources is a project that provides a web-based interface intothe source code of every package in the Debian softwarearchive—not a small task by any means. But, as StefanoZacchiroli and Matthieu Caneill explained in their DebConf 2015session, Debsources is far more than a source-code browsing tool. Itprovides a searchable viewport into 20 years offree-software history, which makes it viable as a platform for manyvarieties of research and experimentation.
Version 3.7 of the LLVM compiler suite is out. "This release contains the work of the LLVM community over the past sixmonths: full OpenMP 3.1 support (behind a flag), the On RequestCompilation (ORC) JIT API, a new backend for Berkeley Packet Filter(BPF), Control Flow Integrity checking, as well as improvedoptimizations, new Clang warnings, many bug fixes, and more."See the release notes for LLVM andClangfor details.
Ars Technica reportsthat Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Cisco, Intel, Netflix, and Amazon havelaunched a new consortium, the Alliance for Open Media. "TheAlliance for Open Media would put an end to this problem [of patent licenses and royalties]. The group's first aim is to produce a video codec that's a meaningful improvement on HEVC. Many of the members already have their own work on next-generation codecs; Cisco has Thor, Mozilla has been working on Daala, and Google on VP9 and VP10. Daala and Thor are both also under consideration by the IETF's netvc working group, which is similarly trying to assemble a royalty-free video codec."
Fedora has updated qemu (F21: multiple vulnerabilities).Oracle has updated gdk-pixbuf2 (OL7; OL6: code execution), jakarta-taglibs-standard (OL7; OL6: code execution), and nss-softokn (OL7; OL6: signature forgery).Red Hat has updated nss-softokn(RHEL6,7: signature forgery) and pcs(RHEL6,7: privilege escalation).Ubuntu has updated expat (15.04,14.04, 12.04: denial of service) and gnutls28 (15.04: two vulnerabilities).
The OpenSSL project looksat its security record for the last year. "The acceptabletimeline for disclosure is a hot topic in the community: we meet CERT’s45-day disclosure deadline more often than not, and we’ve never blownProject Zero’s 90-day baseline. Most importantly, we met the goal we setourselves and released fixes for all HIGH severity issues in well under amonth. We also landed mitigation for two high-profile protocol bugs, POODLEand Logjam. Those disclosure deadlines weren’t under our control but ourresponse was prepared by the day the reports went public."
The ownCloud Contributor Conference2015 (August 28-September 3 in Berlin, Germany) started off with some bigannouncements, including the publishing of the User Data Manifesto 2.0, thecreation of the ownCloud Security Bug Bounty Program, and the release ofthe ownCloud Proxy app. "Designed for those of you who want your own private, secure “Dropbox†and don’t want the hassle of configuring routers, firewalls and DNS entries for access from anywhere, at any time, ownCloud Proxy is for you. It comes installed as an ownCloud community app in the new ownCloud community appliance, connects to relay servers in the cloud, and provides anytime, anywhere access to your files, on your PC running in your home network, quickly and easily. And, of course, you can grab it from the ownCloud app store and add it to an existing ownCloud server if you already have one running."
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