Brief items

Mozilla: It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy

The Mozilla Foundation has published a report on the data-collection and privacy practices of 25 car brands.

We reviewed 25 car brands in our research and we handed out 25 "dings" for how those companies collect and use data and personal information. That’s right: every car brand we looked at collects more personal data than necessary and uses that information for a reason other than to operate your vehicle and manage their relationship with you. For context, 63% of the mental health apps (another product category that stinks at privacy) we reviewed this year received this "ding."

Proof, once again, that running Linux does not automatically make a device privacy-friendly.

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Kernel release status

The 6.6 merge window is still open; it can be expected to close on September 10.

Stable updates: 6.5.1, 6.4.14, 6.1.51, 5.15.130, 5.10.194, 5.4.256, 4.19.294, and 4.14.325 were all released on September 2, followed by 6.5.2, 6.4.15, 6.1.52, and 5.15.131 on September 6.

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A guide to network performance tuning

Leandro Moreira is maintaining a detailed description of Linux network tuning parameters and how they all tie together. There is a lot of good information for administrators seeking a better understanding of how all those knobs work and interoperate. (Seen on HN).

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Quote of the week

We need to get away from the idea that we have to support old filesystems forever because someone, somewhere might have an old disk on the shelf with that filesystem on it and they might plug it in one day. If that day ever happens, they can go to the effort of booting an era-relevant distro in a VM to extract that data. It makes no sense to put an ongoing burden on current development to support this sort of rare, niche use case.

— Dave Chinner

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KDE Gear 23.08 Arrived With Plenty of Changes (FOSS Force)

FOSS Force looks at the KDE Gear 23.08 release.

For this release, developers have been working in high gear (no pun intended) as there were important improvements made to many of Gear’s most iconic applications. Not only that: just a little over a year after its arrival, the Kalendar app is going through a name change as it morphs into what appears will eventually become a full-featured email application.

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