Brief items

Security quote of the week

One preferred idea is to just jail the employees of a company who happen to be in the country that wants content blocked. Over the years we've seen that happen (or attempt to happen) in Italy, Brazil, and recently India.

For many companies, the best way to deal with this is to avoid having any employees in those countries where such threats are likely to happen. There's a reason Google pulled employees out of Russia, for example.

But now that various countries seem to enjoy the ability to jail random employees of internet companies who won't do they're bidding, they're moving to pass laws to require local employees if a company wants to operate in that country. In many cases, these seem to be fairly transparent attempts to make sure that the government has hostages it can threaten to jail should the company not suppress content in the way its leaders wish.

— Mike Masnick

Comments (14 posted)

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 5.13-rc2, released on May 16. "The fixes here are all over the place - drivers, arch updates, documentation, tooling.. Nothing particularly stands out".

Stable updates: 5.12.4, 5.11.21, 5.10.37, and 5.4.119 were released on May 14, followed by 5.12.5, 5.11.22, 5.10.38, and 5.4.120 on May 18. Note that 5.11.22 is the last release in the 5.11 series.

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Quotes of the week

There isn't any other subsystem with that much knowledge about how to stand up the entire accelerator stack and not making it suck too badly. That is the real value of dri-devel and the community we have here, not the code sharing we occasionally tend to do.

— Daniel Vetter

Imagine you are at a conference and two people sit down next to you, one on either side. The one accidentally spills coffee on your lap. The other plugs in a USB device to your laptop. Now you are infected with spyware.

— Dan Carpenter

Comments (2 posted)

T2 Linux 21.5 "Because we can" for 18 architectures

The T2 System Development Environment Linux 21.5 was released with 18 pre- and cross-compiled architectures. "The 21.5 release received updates across the board, while a major point of work was the GCC 11 update as well as re-basing and fixing upstream regressions for the Sony PS3 support as well as various small improvements, including an up to 15 seconds faster system shutdown when using sysvinit."

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Distribution quote of the week

But for GNOME I was just a user who happened to be a Gentoo Developer, so I started by just poking and asking if there was anything I could do to help. Unfortunately the answer was "no" nearly every time.

So I just watched and occasionally asked how things were going. And occasionally GNOME updates happened, but the gap between Gentoo and upstream never really closed. GNOME 3.26 was added to Gentoo, and before significant progress was made on adding 3.28 or 3.30 a new major version 3.32 was released upstream. It looked like we were just treading water.

What's worse, there were multiple unofficial overlays often providing newer versions of GNOME than what the ::gentoo repository contained. For reasons that were never clear to me, it seemed that none of the external overlay contributors (one of whom was a full Gentoo Developer!) were willing or able to collaborate with the Gentoo GNOME team.

— Matt Turner

Comments (3 posted)

Introducing Site Isolation in Firefox (Mozilla security blog)

The Mozilla Security Blog announces that there is a new site-isolation mechanism available for testing in the Firefox browser. It's a defense against Meltdown and Spectre exploits.

This fundamental redesign of Firefox's Security architecture extends current security mechanisms by creating operating system process-level boundaries for all sites loaded in Firefox for Desktop. Isolating each site into a separate operating system process makes it even harder for malicious sites to read another site’s secret or private data.

Comments (34 posted)

Development quote of the week

Many developers, mostly native English speakers, will tell you, in good faith, that the language problem is secondary, that you just need to contribute the code. The reality of the facts is unfortunately different. More than once I have been forced to edit a PR more to fix the English text inevitably contained in it (eg: docstring) than to improve the code, and sometimes just to “harmonize” the English style in that project.

My personal experience and also that of the local FLOSS communities I attend make me declare with certainty that the first barrier to entry into the FLOSS community is the language barrier, which is even more so for newcomers to the community.

— Paolo Melchiorre (Thanks to Paul Wise)

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Upheaval at freenode

Several readers have alerted us to some serious problems at freenode, which runs an IRC network that is popular in the free-software world. Evidently there has been a change of control within the volunteer-run organization that has led to the resignations of multiple different volunteers, at least in part due to a concern about the personal information of freenode users under the new management. "The freenode resignation FAQ" has collected a bunch of information (and links to even more resignation letters) that may help shed some light on this mess. From the FAQ: "Freenode staff have stepped down. The network that runs at freenode.org/net/com should now be assumed to be under control of a malicious party." In the meantime, many of the volunteers who resigned have formed Libera.Chat to continue the legacy of freenode. LWN will be keeping an eye on the situation, stay tuned ...

Comments (103 posted)