Brief items

Security

Security quotes of the week

Assume you take the app out grocery shopping with you and it subsequently alerts you of a contact. What should you do? It's not accurate enough for you to quarantine yourself for two weeks. And without ubiquitous, cheap, fast, and accurate testing, you can't confirm the app's diagnosis. So the alert is useless.

Similarly, assume you take the app out grocery shopping and it doesn't alert you of any contact. Are you in the clear? No, you're not. You actually have no idea if you've been infected.

The end result is an app that doesn't work. People will post their bad experiences on social media, and people will read those posts and realize that the app is not to be trusted. That loss of trust is even worse than having no app at all.

It has nothing to do with privacy concerns. The idea that contact tracing can be done with an app, and not human health professionals, is just plain dumb.

— Bruce Schneier on contact-tracing apps

It's called end-to-end encryption because possibly-compromised-device-allegedly-controlled-by-party-1-to-possibly-compromised-device-allegedly-controlled-by-party-2 encryption doesn't roll off the tongue as easily.

— Peter Gutmann

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Kernel development

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 5.7-rc4, released on May 3. Linus said: "Anyway, it doesn't feel like there's anything worrisome going on, so come on in and test the waters."

Stable updates: this week's stable-kernel flood started with 5.6.9 and 5.4.37 on May 2. Then, 5.6.10, 5.4.38, 4.19.120, 4.14.178, 4.9.221, and 4.4.221 came on May 4, followed by 5.6.11, 5.4.39, 4.19.121, 4.14.179, 4.9.222, and 4.4.222 on May 6.

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Development

Firefox 76.0

Firefox 76.0 has been released. This version features a number of improvements to password management, Picture-in-Picture allows a small video window to follow you around as you work, and support for Audio Worklets has been added, allowing more complex audio processing. The release notes have more details.

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Inkscape 1.0 released

Version 1.0 of the Inkscape drawing editor has been released. "One of the first things users will notice is a reorganized tool box, with a more logical order. There are many new and improved Live Path Effect (LPE) features. The new searchable LPE selection dialog now features a very polished interface, descriptions and even the possibility of marking favorite LPEs. Performance improvements are most noticeable when editing node-heavy objects, using the Objects dialog, and when grouping/ungrouping."

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The 2020 Python Language Summit

The 2020 Python Language Summit was held virtually this year, over two days, via videoconference, with discussions via voice and chat. The summit is a yearly gathering for developers of CPython, other Python implementations, and related projects. As with last year, A. Jesse Jiryu Davis covered the summit; his writeups are being posted to the Python Software Foundation (PSF) blog. So far, all of the first day's session writeups are up, as well as two (of six) from the second day. Topics include "All strings become f-strings", "The path forward for typing", "A formal specification for the (C)Python virtual machine", and more.

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The Wayland Protocol

Drew DeVault has just released a (mostly complete) book on the Wayland display-server protocol under the Creative Commons CC-SA license. "This book will help you establish a firm understanding of the concepts, design, and implementation of Wayland, and equip you with the tools to build your own Wayland client and server applications. Over the course of your reading, we'll build a mental model of Wayland and establish the rationale that went into its design. Within these pages you should find many 'aha!' moments as the intuitive design choices of Wayland become clear, which should help to keep the pages turning." For those who would rather peruse (or contribute to) the Markdown source, it's available here.

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