Brief items
Security
Firefox bug disables all extensions
The expiration of the extension signing certificate has evidently caused all extensions to be disabled, leading to a fair amount of discomfort on the net. There is evidently a fix being rolled out, but it requires that the "Studies" mechanism be enabled in the privacy preferences. Meanwhile, the best short-term approach seems to be to avoid restarting Firefox if possible.Security quotes of the week
The reality is that your sensitive data has likely already been stolen,
multiple times. Cybercriminals have your credit card information. They have
your social security number and your mother's maiden name. They have your
address and phone number. They obtained the data by hacking any one of the
hundreds of companies you entrust with the data -- and you have no
visibility into those companies' security practices, and no recourse when
they lose your data.
— Bruce
Schneier
So while the insight that traditional 2FA is really "something you know and
something else you know, albeit only very recently," security keys are
"Something you know and something you have, which someone else can have, if
they know something you know."
— Cory
Doctorow
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The 5.1 kernel was released on May 5 (announcement). Some of the significant changes in the release include BPF spinlocks, more year-2038 preparation, the TEO CPU-idle governor, The io_uring fast asynchronous I/O mechanism, initial support for pidfds (file descriptors that refer to a process), the SafeSetID security module, and much more. See the KernelNewbies 5.1 page for lots of details.Stable updates: this has been a busy week for the stable kernels, with the following releases being made:
- 5.0.11, 4.19.38, 4.14.115, and 4.9.172 (May 2).
- 5.0.12, 4.19.39, 4.14.116, and 4.9.173 (May 4).
- 5.0.13 and 4.19.40 (May 5).
- 5.0.14, 4.19.41, 4.14.117, and 4.9.174 (May 8).
Quote of the week
Beginning with Windows Insiders builds this Summer, we will include
an in-house custom-built Linux kernel to underpin the newest
version of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). This marks the
first time that the Linux kernel will be included as a component in
Windows.
— Microsoft
Distributions
GNU Guix 1.0.0 released
Version 1.0.0 of the GNU Guix package manager has been released. "This 1.0 release is a major milestone for Guix. It represents 7 years of hard work with more than 40,000 commits by 260 people, 19 releases, and an equally amazing amount of work on documentation, translation, artwork, web design, mentoring, outreach, and many other activities that together have made it a thriving project." See this blog entry for more information.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 released
Red Hat has announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. "Modern IT is hybrid IT. But turning a sprawling ecosystem—from traditional datacenters to public cloud services—into a true hybrid environment requires a few things. Scaling as needed. Moving workloads seamlessly. Developing and managing applications that run anywhere. There's an operating system that makes those things possible. And now it gives you predictive analytics and remediation." See the release notes for more information.
Development
dav1d 0.3.0 released
The Alliance for Open Media developed the AV1 patent-free video codec and sponsors the development of dav1d, a reference optimized decoder for AV1. The 0.3.0 release of dav1d is now available. "This third release continues to increase the ARM and SSSE3 speed, with more optimizations, as announced, and we get between 12 and 25% speed increases on those CPUs, depending on the samples. However, more surprisingly, we got a speedup on AVX-2 CPU, by optimizing the MSAC (entropy decoding), while we did not find a good solution in the past. This brings 4-5% speed improvements, which is quite huge, knowing the maturity of the AVX-2 code."
Firefox 66.0.4 released
There is a new Firefox browser release available; its main claim to fame is that it has a fix for the certificate issue that disabled all extensions.GCC 9.1 Released
Version 9.1 of the GCC compiler suite is out. "In this release C++17 support is no longer marked experimental. The C++ front-end implements the full C++17 language (already previous GCC major version implemented that) and the C++ standard library support is almost complete. The C++ front-end and library also have numerous further C++2a draft features. GCC has a new front-end for the D language. GCC 9.1 has newly partial OpenMP 5.0 support and almost complete OpenACC 2.5 support." See this page for an extensive list of changes.
Development quote of the week
I chose general-purpose computing as the winning fight—the one most worth having—because we wouldn't have Linux, free software or open source today if there weren't general-purpose computers to develop and use them on. General-purpose computing is the goose that laid all our golden eggs. The fight is to keep it alive.
— Doc Searls
Page editor: Jake Edge
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