Brief items
Security
Introducing Microsoft Azure Sphere
Microsoft has issued a press release describing the security dangers involved with the Internet of things ("a weaponized stove, baby monitors that spy, the contents of your refrigerator being held for ransom") and introducing "Microsoft Azure Sphere" as a combination of hardware and software to address the problem. "
Unlike the RTOSes common to MCUs today, our defense-in-depth IoT OS offers multiple layers of security. It combines security innovations pioneered in Windows, a security monitor, and a custom Linux kernel to create a highly-secured software environment and a trustworthy platform for new IoT experiences."
Security quotes of week
One big question is the “privacy paradox”. Why do people say they care about privacy, yet behave otherwise? Part of the answer is about context; and part of it is about learning. Over time, more and more people are starting to pay attention to online privacy settings, despite attempts by Facebook and other online advertising firms to keep changing privacy settings to confuse people.
With luck, the Facebook scandal will be a “flashbulb moment” that will drive lots more people to start caring about their privacy online. It will certainly provide interesting new data to privacy researchers.
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 4.17-rc1, released on April 15. Linus said: "This does not seem to be shaping up to be a particularly big release, and there seems to be nothing particularly special about it. The most special thing that happened is purely numerology: we've passed the six million git objects mark, and that is reason enough to call the next kernel 5.0. Except I probably won't, because I don't want to be too predictable."
Stable updates: 4.16.2, 4.15.17, and 4.14.34 came out on April 12, followed by 4.9.94, 4.4.128, and 3.18.105 on the 13th. The 4.16.3, 4.15.18, and 4.14.35 updates are in the review process; they are due on April 19. Note that 4.15.18 will be the final update for the 4.15 kernel.
Quotes of the week
Right now, it's estimated that only about 1/3 of the kernels running out there, at the best, are an "enterprise" kernel/distro. 2/3 of the world either run a kernel.org-based release + their own patches, or Debian. And Debian piggy-backs on the stable kernel releases pretty regularly.
So the majority of the Linux users out there are what we are doing this for. Those that do not pay for a company to sift through things and only cherry-pick what they want to pick out (hint, they almost always miss things, some do this better than others...)
That's who this is all for, which is why we are doing our best to keep on top of the avalanche of patches going into upstream to get the needed fixes (both security and "normal" fixes) out to users as soon as possible.
Distributions
Distribution quote of the week
That's more convoluted, but I think that it does a better job at conveying that we are not owners of the packages we maintain, but rather that we are taking care of a small part of a greater whole, governed by rules and processes that enable it to be resilient to maintainers being away/busy or leaving the project, or to technical disagreements. And actually many of the hardest things we have done over the years have been about building those balanced rules and processes, maybe more than solving technical issues.
Development
Pip 10.0 has been released
The release of pip 10.0 has been announced. Some highlights of this release include the removal of Python 2.6 support, limited PEP 518 support (with more to come), a new "pip config" command, and other improvements.postmarketOS Low-Level
Alpine Linux-based postmarketOS is touch-optimized and pre-configured for installation on smartphones and other mobile devices. The postmarketOS blog introduces postmarketOS-lowlevel which is a community project aimed at creating free bootloaders and cellular modem firmware, currently focused on MediaTek phones. "But before we get started, please keep in mind that these are moon shots. So while there is some little progress, it's mostly about letting fellow hackers know what we've tried and what we're up to, in the hopes of attracting more interested talent to our cause. After all, our philosophy is to keep the community informed and engaged during the development phase!"
New PyPI launched
The new PyPI has been launched. Browser traffic and API calls (including "pip install") have been redirected from the old pypi.python.org to the new site. The old PyPI will shut down on April 30. LWN covered the new PyPI last week.Apache Subversion 1.10.0 released
Version 1.10 of the Subversion version-control system is out. Improvements include a new interactive resolver for merge conflicts, better path-based authorization, LZ4 compression, and more; see the release notes for details.Development quote of the week
Page editor: Jake Edge
Next page:
Announcements>>