Brief items
Security
Security quote of the week
Peter Swire proposes a a
pedagogic framework [PDF] for teaching cybersecurity
policy. Specifically, he makes real the old joke about adding levels to the
OSI networking stack: an organizational layer, a government layer, and an
international layer.
— Bruce
Schneier
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 4.20-rc7, released on December 16. "The plan remains the same: if everything continues normally, I'll release 4.20 just before christmas, and then just have a more leisurely merge window than normal."
Stable updates have not been in short supply. 4.19.9, 4.14.88, 4.9.145, 4.4.167, and 3.18.129 were released on December 13; 4.19.10, 4.14.89, 4.9.146, 4.4.168, and 3.18.130 on December 17; and 4.19.11 on December 19.
Padovan: A dream come true
Gustavo Padovan notes an important milestone in Linux graphics development: "The dream finally came true in 2018 with the release of the Google Pixel 3, the first Android phone running with the mainline graphics stack. A feat that was deemed impossible 10 years ago is now a reality thanks to a lot of hard work from the entire community."
Quote of the week
If you are claiming that I am worrying unnecessarily, you are
probably right. But if I didn't worry unnecessarily, RCU wouldn't
work at all!
Distributions
HardenedBSD 12 released
HardenedBSD has released version 12 of its security-enhanced fork of FreeBSD. Improvements in this release include Non-Cross-DSO Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) for applications on amd64 and arm64; jailed bhyve; per-jail toggles for unprivileged process debugging; Spectre v2 mitigation with retpoline applied to the entirety of base and ports; Symmetric Multi-Threading (SMT) disabled by default; and more.Distribution quotes of the week
I personally believe this can explain the kind of resistance you are
finding on this matter from Debian people: I am not sure that it would
be true to say that Debian people like to go together, but in a sense we
need to do so, because there is no other way to manage a gigantic thing
like Debian, even less so when you have (as we have) to keep contact
with the wider free software/open source ecosystem. There are many
different people, with different opinions and motivations, so compromise
is something that you have to accept.
— Giovanni Mascellani
Debian/Devuan is not a ready-to-use-out-of-the-box distro like Ubuntu
or Mint. It's more a pick-what-you-want-and-carry-on distro.
— Enzo Nicosia
Development
Development quotes of the week
I guess this decision to ship all of them was made in case a GNOME user ended up on a desert island, and once saved by a passing ship after 10 years, they could be able to say: "this is the text editor I use daily, this is the text editor I use in the holidays, and that’s the text editor I will never use".
— Emmanuele
Bassi
I'm concerned about the perception that it's impossible for development of free software to be financially self supporting, and that the only way to handle this is to develop new licenses that forbid certain use cases. There's a real problem where individual developers are left with little reward for developing code that giant commercial enterprises depend on, but we're largely seeing this push come from venture capital firms who just want a larger return on their investment. The free software community needs to come up with an answer to this that doesn't involve trying to extort money out of companies in order for them to be able to legally exercise the freedoms that free software should guarantee, but I don't know what that answer is yet.
— Matthew
Garrett (Thanks to Paul Wise)
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