Brief items [LWN.net]

Security

Security quote of the week

Likewise for individuals, it pays to accept two unfortunate and harsh realities:

Reality #1: Bad guys already have access to personal data points that you may believe should be secret but which nevertheless aren’t, including your credit card information, Social Security number, mother’s maiden name, date of birth, address, previous addresses, phone number, and yes — even your credit file.
Reality #2: Any data point you share with a company will in all likelihood eventually be hacked, lost, leaked, stolen or sold — usually through no fault of your own. And if you’re an American, it means (at least for the time being) your recourse to do anything about that when it does happen is limited or nil.

— Brian Krebs

Comments (1 posted)

Kernel development

The current development kernel is 4.20-rc6, released on December 9. "Most of it looks pretty small and normal. Would I have preferred for there to be less churn? Yes. But it's certainly smaller than rc5 was, so we're moving in the right direction, and we have at least one more rc to go."

Stable updates: 4.19.8, 4.14.87, and 4.9.144 were released on December 8. The 4.19.9, 4.14.88, 4.9.145, 4.4.167, and 3.18.139 updates are in the review process; they are due on December 13.

Comments (none posted)

The x32 subarchitecture may be removed

The x32 subarchitecture is a software variant of x86-64; it runs the processor in the 64-bit mode, but uses 32-bit pointers and arithmetic. The idea is to get the advantages of x86-64 without the extra memory usage that goes along with it. It seems, though, that x32 is not much appreciated; few distributions support it and the number of users appears to be small. So now Andy Lutomirski is proposing its eventual removal:

I propose that we make CONFIG_X86_X32 depend on BROKEN for a release or two and then remove all the code if no one complains. If anyone wants to re-add it, IMO they're welcome to do so, but they need to do it in a way that is maintainable.

If there are x32 users out there, now would be a good time for them to speak up.

Comments (55 posted)

Quote of the week

lkml and Linus gained a CoC, and it's serious this time. Which means my no 1 reason for declining to officially step up as drm maintainer is gone, and I didn't find any new good excuse. [...]

Rough idea is that I'll do this for maybe 2-3 years, helping Dave figure out a group model for drm overall. And getting the tooling and infrastructure for that off the ground. Then step down again because some other shiny thing that needs chasing. Of course as plans tend to do, this one will probably pan out a bit different in reality.

— Daniel Vetter

Comments (none posted)

Distributions

Distribution quotes of the week

Here are some definitions:

Good: Package meets all Fedora Packaging Guidelines && Package has no Legal issues

Bad: Package has Legal Issues, may or may not meet the remainder of Fedora Packaging Guidelines

Ugly: Package does not have Legal Issues, does not meet Fedora Packaging Guidelines

You may put "Good" and "Ugly" packages in a Copr.
You may put "Good" packages into Fedora.
You cannot put "Bad" packages in either.

— Tom Callaway

Deepin does something unique that I haven't seen in any other Linux distribution I've tried. Or for that matter, in any version of macOS or Windows. This compels me to describe it as simultaneously sexy and sensible. I know, it's an unusual combination!

— Jason Evangelho

The answer is that there is no single Devuan user, and no single Devuan use-case, as the statistics above confirm. What is perfect for somebody, is dumb or useless for somebody else, and vice-versa. The whole point is to make an effort to look at the bigger picture:

Since Devuan is one of the few dpkg-based systemd-free distributions around, we have the *obligation* to cater for as many use cases as possible.

— Enzo Nicosia

Comments (5 posted)

Development

Microsoft's Edge browser moving to Chromium

Microsoft has announced that its "Edge" browser is joining the Chromium world. "Today we’re announcing that we intend to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers. As part of this, we intend to become a significant contributor to the Chromium project, in a way that can make not just Microsoft Edge — but other browsers as well — better on both PCs and other devices."

Comments (47 posted)

Firefox 64 released

The Mozilla Blog takes a look at the Contextual Feature Recommender (CFR) in Firefox 64. "Aimed at people who are looking to get more out of their online experience or ways to level up. CFR is a system that proactively recommends Firefox features and add-ons based on how you use the web. For example, if you open multiple tabs and repeatedly use these tabs, we may offer a feature called “Pinned Tabs” and explain how it works. Firefox curates the suggested features and notifies you. With today’s release, we will start to rollout with three recommended extensions which include: Facebook Container, Enhancer for YouTube and To Google Translate. This feature is available for US users in regular browsing mode only. They will not appear in Private Browsing mode. Also, Mozilla does NOT receive a copy of your browser history. The entire process happens locally in your copy of Firefox." The release notes contain more details about this release.

Comments (36 posted)

Git 2.20.0 released

Git 2.20.0 is out. Changes include interdiff generation support in git format-patch, an improved ability to cope with corrupted patches in git am, a number of performance and usability improvements, and more.

Full Story (comments: 1)

Hutterer: Understanding HID report descriptors

For those who would like a deeper understanding of how the human interface device (HID) protocol works, Peter Hutterer has posted a detailed overview. "Originally HID was designed to work over USB. But just like Shrek the technology world is obsessed with layers so these days HID works over different transport layers. HID over USB is what your mouse uses, HID over i2c may be what your touchpad uses. HID works over Bluetooth and it's celebrity-diet version BLE. Somewhere, someone out there is very slowly moving a mouse pointer by sending HID over carrier pigeons just to prove a point. Because there's always that one guy."

Comments (none posted)

Nextcloud 15 released

Version 15 of the Nextcloud productivity and communications platform is out. New features include Mastodon integration, two-factor authentication, a number of user-interface improvements, and more.

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Development quotes of the week

I looked at the early C++ bindings and I’m still in awe of the Rube Goldberg machine that was used to build them; the only things missing in the project build were a small marble, an hamster wheel, two pool cues, and a bowling bowl.

— Emmanuele Bassi (Thanks to Stu Tomlinson)

As users we generally like devices to work out of the box. Hardware manufacturers generally like to add bits and bobs because otherwise who would buy that new device when last year's device looks identical. This difference in needs can only be solved by one superhero: Committee-man, with the superpower to survive endless meetings and get RFCs approved.

Many many moons ago, when USB itself was in its infancy, Committee man and his sidekick Caffeine boy got the USB consortium agree on a standard for input devices that is so self-descriptive that operating systems (Win95!) can write one driver that can handle this year's device, and next year's, and so on. No need to install extra drivers, your device will just work out of the box. And so HID was born. This may only an approximate summary of history.

— Peter Hutterer

Comments (3 posted)

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