Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.0-rc4, released on September 4. Linus said: "We're up to rc4, and things mostly still look fairly normal".

Beyond the usual fixes, 6.0-rc4 includes one feature change: a hook to allow security modules to control access to the io_uring command pass-through mechanism. See this article for the background behind this late-arriving change.

Stable updates: 5.19.7, 5.15.65, 5.10.141, 5.4.212, 4.19.257, 4.14.292, and 4.9.327 were all released on September 5.

The 5.19.8, 5.15.66, and 5.10.142 updates are in the review process; they are due on September 8.

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OpenWrt 22.03.0 released

Version 22.03.0 of the OpenWrt distribution for routers (and beyond) has been released. "It incorporates over 3800 commits since branching the previous OpenWrt 21.02 release and has been under development for about one year". Changes include a new firewall implementation using nftables, year-2038 readiness, dark mode in the LuCI web-based administration tool, and support for many more devices.

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Distributions quote of the week

One of the things that I like about Debian is that it is not gNewSense and we take a more practical and less ideologically purist approach to free software. I would prefer that we move in a direction of even more pragmatism than we currently have.

— Russ Allbery

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Arti 1.0.0 released

Arti is a reimplementation of the Tor server in Rust; version 1.0.0 has just been released and proclaimed ready for production use.

When we defined our set of milestones, we defined Arti 1.0.0 as "ready for production use": You should be able to use it in the real world, to get a similar degree of privacy, usability, and stability to what you would with a C client Tor. The APIs should be (more or less) stable for embedders.

We believe we have achieved this. You can now use arti proxy to connect to the Tor network to anonymize your network connections.

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Gawk 5.2.0 released

Version 5.2.0 of the GNU Awk implementation is out. The biggest change, perhaps, is the addition of "persistent memory" support that allows gawk to keep values around between runs. Old-timers will be disappointed by the removal of VAX/VMS support.

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Peter Eckersley RIP

Peter Eckersley, one of the original founders of the Let's Encrypt non-profit TLS certificate authority, has died suddenly, as reported by Seth Schoen:

Peter was the leader of EFF's contributions to Let's Encrypt and ACME over the course of several years during which these technologies turned from a wild idea into an important part of Internet infrastructure. He also took a lot of initiative in coalescing the EFF, Mozilla, and University of Michigan teams into a single team and a single project. He later served on the initial board of directors of the Internet Security Research Group.

[...] Toward the end of his life, Peter focused his career on ethics and safety of artificial intelligence, and he founded the AI Objectives Institute to examine the concrete parallels he saw between surprising and undesirable outcomes that can emerge within economies and those that can emerge in machine learning systems.

More about Eckersley can be found at his web site, on his Wikipedia page, and in a Hacker News discussion.

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