At his blog, Luis Villa muses on the topic of RSS and what can be learned from Google's decision to kill Google Reader. Villa contends that "the widely perceived failure of RSS is not really a failure of RSS, but rather a failure of the user experience of discovering and subscribing to RSS." In other words, Mozilla and other browser vendors have dropped the ball by not treating feeds as "a first-class web citizen," which helps walled-in, proprietary solutions like Facebook and Twitter. Solving the problem is not simple, he admits, but he does float the idea that browsers "provide a minimum viable product for light web users – possibly by supplementing the current 'here are your favorite sites' links with a clean, light reader focused on only the current top headlines."

The Fedora 19 alpha release is available for testers. "We need your help to make Fedora 19 the best release yet, so please take a moment of your time to download and try out the Alpha and make sure the things that are important to you are working." There is a lot of new stuff in this release; see the announcement for an overview.

Debian has updated curl (cookie information disclosure).

Fedora has updated xorg-x11-server (F18: information disclosure) and phpmyadmin (F18; F17: cross-site scripting).

Mandriva has updated libarchive (denial of service).

Slackware has updated xorg-server (information disclosure).

The 3.9-rc8 prepatch is out. "Yes, I was really hoping (and originally planning) to release 3.9 final this weekend, but we had enough issues that I just didn't feel comfy about it. It was borderline, and none of the issues were huge, and maybe I could have called this just 3.9 and opened the merge window, but hey, another week won't hurt."