Brief items

Security quotes of the week

Apple is likely to turn the [end-to-end encryption] feature off for UK users rather than break it for everyone worldwide. Of course, UK users will be able to spoof their location. But this might not be enough. According to the law, Apple would not be able to offer the feature to anyone who is in the UK at any point: for example, a visitor from the US.

And what happens next? Australia has a law enabling it to ask for the same thing. Will it? Will even more countries follow?

This is madness.

— Bruce Schneier on a report that the UK is requiring Apple to break its iCloud encryption

But there is something fundamentally different about talking with a bot as opposed to a person. A person can be a friend. An AI cannot be a friend, despite how people might treat it or react to it. AI is at best a tool, and at worst a means of manipulation. Humans need to know whether we're talking with a living, breathing person or a robot with an agenda set by the person who controls it. That's why robots should sound like robots.

[...] We have a simple proposal: all talking AIs and robots should use a ring modulator. In the mid-twentieth century, before it was easy to create actual robotic-sounding speech synthetically, ring modulators were used to make actors' voices sound robotic. Over the last few decades, we have become accustomed to robotic voices, simply because text-to-speech systems were good enough to produce intelligible speech that was not human-like in its sound. Now we can use that same technology to make robotic speech that is indistinguishable from human sound robotic again.

— Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan

Comments (3 posted)

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.14-rc2, released on February 9. Linus said:

It's Sunday afternoon, and I'm releasing the usual regularly scheduled release candidate while the rest of the US is getting ready for the biggest day in TV commercials interrupted by some kind of lawn bowling tournament.

Stable updates: 6.13.2, 6.12.13, and 6.6.76 were released on February 8, followed by 6.6.77 (with a single fix for a build problem) on February 11.

Comments (none posted)

A Rust-for-Linux policy document

Miguel Ojeda has announced the posting of a new document describing policies around the use of Rust in the Linux kernel.

There has been a fair amount of confusion about what the kernel policies around Rust are, who maintains what and so on. This document tries to clarify some of these points with what, to the best of our knowledge, is the current status.

Comments (3 posted)

Quotes of the week

I *am* very wary of Benevolent Entities, because we have too many very recent examples of companies "realigning priorities" when political winds shift. Programs and initiatives that have until recently been poster board examples of progress and benevolence are shuttered and defunded. I am concerned that we're only a couple of mood swings away from someone deciding that free software should not be allowed to exist because it benefits America's foes. Many of us remember all too well when large tech giants treated Linux as a "cancer" to be opposed, and I can certainly see that idea easily re-entering some Big Brain in Charge.

From my perspective, I would like to ensure that Linux development can continue without a hard dependency on a single centralized forge -- whether controlled by a large commercial entity, or even a standalone one that is operated by kernel.org.

— Konstantin Ryabitsev

Now, kernel.org is very much _convenient_. And you see that in the stats: of my pulls in the last year, 85% have been from kernel.org. But that is very much because it is convenient, not because it's centralized.

But that still leaves the 15% that aren't kernel.org.

Since I did the stats, in case anybody is interested, the top non-kernel.org hosts for my pulls are github.com, git.samba.org, gitlab.freedesktop.org, evilpiepirate.org, git.infradead.org and git.lwn.net (and there's a handful of other ones in there).

— Linus Torvalds

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OpenWrt 24.10.0 released

Version 24.10.0 of the OpenWrt router-oriented distribution has been released. Changes include an update to the 6.6 kernel, use of access control lists on larger systems, multipath TCP support, better WiFi6 support, the beginning of WiFi7 support, and more.

Comments (3 posted)

Arti 1.4.0 released

Version 1.4.0 of Arti, the Tor Project's next-generation Tor client written in Rust, has been released. Notable improvements in this release include a new RPC interface, and preparatory work toward service-side onion service denial-of-service resistance. The release is dedicated to the memory of Jérémy Bobbio, better known by many as "Lunar". For full details on the release, see the changelog.

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LibreOffice 25.2 released

Version 25.2 of the LibreOffice productivity suite is out. Changes include the ability to remove all personal information from any document, support for ODF version 1.4, a number of accessibility improvements, and more; see the release notes for details.

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OpenInfra board calls for input on joining Linux Foundation

Jonathan Bryce has announced two open community meetings to hear input on the topic of the OpenInfra Foundation migrating to the Linux Foundation. Bryce wrote that the OpenInfra board has carefully evaluated its options, and sees joining the Linux Foundation as the best way forward.

Like the Linux Foundation, the OpenInfra Foundation is 501(c)(6) nonprofit. According to the FAQ, OpenInfra "is in great health, financially and otherwise" with a growth in membership of about 15% in the last year. However, its needs in 2025 are different than when it was founded as the OpenStack Foundation in 2012.

While the opportunities ahead for open source to make a positive impact on the world are greater than they have ever been, the challenges are more significant as well, particularly with respect to regulations, licensing and geopolitical tensions that threaten global collaboration.

The meetings will be held on February 11 and February 13 as Zoom calls. The OpenInfra board will schedule a vote after feedback has been collected and draft governance documents have been published.

Comments (5 posted)

Plasma 6.3 released

Version 6.3 of the Plasma desktop has been released.

One year on, with the teething problems a major new release inevitably brings firmly behind us, Plasma's developers have worked on fine-tuning, squashing bugs and adding features to Plasma 6 — turning it into the best desktop environment for everyone.

Changes include improved support for drawing tablets, better fractional-scaling support, and more.

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Development quote of the week

The people who think they are good at everything because they are good at coding are also bad at coding.

—Eva Galperin

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Codeberg responds to hate attacks

The Codeberg development forge has recently been subject to sustained attacks resulting in, among other things, abusive email being sent to the site's users. The organization has now put up a description and a defiant response:

Extreme right forces actively target members of our communities and discriminate based on ethnicity and gender, political background, sexual orientation, disabilities, nationality and faith. However diversity is an important asset in free/libre software communities and it is what makes our software great and development productive.

By targeting some of our most active translators, nicest designers, best developers and all other motivated contributors, they are hurting the free/libre software ecosystem as a whole.

Comments (28 posted)