Security updates have been issued by Fedora (dovecot, dpdk, knot-resolver, and unbound), Mageia (ant, libexif, and php), SUSE (libmspack), and Ubuntu (php5, php7.0, php7.2, php7.3, php7.4 and unbound).
Within IT organizations, there are processes and practices so routine that they are invisible. It doesn’t matter if such processes and practices are flawed, or if there exists a better way: if something has worked for a few years, people stop looking for alternatives. This perfectly describes current approaches to kernel patching.
Right now, most organizations patch the servers by planning reboot cycles. Because rebooting the server fleet is a headache that causes downtime, people put it off for as long as they can. Which means patches aren’t applied as early as possible. This gap between patch issue and its application means risk, malpractice and may cause non-compliance.
This standard approach to kernel patching exposes servers to malicious intent by threat actors on multiple attack vectors, putting IT organizations at risk of major security issues. Anyone tasked with keeping their organization safe from cyber attacks should be seeking a better way to run Linux servers without reboots (ideally, for years).
In this article you will learn what is live patching, how it ensures the uptime, what 5 tools are available to help you run servers for years – without reboots and what are the advantages and drawbacks of each tool.
Academics have developed a new tool that allowed them to discover 26 previously unidentified vulnerabilities in the USB driver stack used by many popular operating systems including Linux, macOS, Windows and FreeBSD.
Matthias Payer at the federal polytechnic school in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Hui Peng at Purdue University, United States, said [pdf] that they leveraged open-source components such as QEMU processor emulator to design a tool that's low-cost and hardware independent, called USBFuzz.
With a new fuzzing tool created specifically for testing the security of USB drivers, researchers have discovered more than two dozen vulnerabilities in a variety of operating systems.
“USBFuzz discovered a total of 26 new bugs, including 16 memory bugs of high security impact in various Linux subsystems (USB core, USB sound, and network), one bug in FreeBSD, three in macOS (two resulting in an unplanned reboot and one freezing the system), and four in Windows 8 and Windows 10 (resulting in Blue Screens of Death), and one bug in the Linux USB host controller driver and another one in a USB camera driver,” Hui Peng and Mathias Payer explained.
The U.S. National Security Agency says the same Russian military hacking group that interfered in the 2016 presidential election and unleashed a devastating malware attack the following year has been exploiting a major email server program since last August or earlier.
The timing of the agency's advisory Thursday was unusual considering that the critical vulnerability in the Exim Mail Transfer Agent — which mostly runs on Unix-type operating systems — was identified 11 months ago, when a patch was issued.
Exim is so widely used — though far less known than such commercial alternatives as Microsoft's proprietary Exchange — that some companies and government agencies that run it may still not have patched the vulnerability, said Jake Williams, president of Rendition Infosec and a former U.S. government hacker.
The Call for Participation is still open for two weeks more, but please make us a favour and send yours *now*.
This way we don't have to panic thinking if we are going to need to go chasing people or not, or if we're going to have too few or too many proposals.
Also if you ask the talks committee for review, we can review your talk early, give you feedback and improve it, so it's a win-win.
I’m checking in today to let you know what I did in my GSoC project these past weeks. This Community Bonding period was really wonderful; although I’ve been more or less involved with the project since 2016, I’ve acquainted myself with the efforts of each of the members, and so far it’s been a wonderful experience.
During these past weeks, I’ve been preparing for the coding period by talking with Boudewijn and Wolthera about the particulars of Krita’s file format and build system. The objectives for the past two meetings were:
About the Project
The project involves improving KDE Web Infrastructure. KDE has a lot of websites and some of them like the main website could use an update.
The first part of the project involves porting kde.org to use Hugo- A go based static site generator. kde.org is very old and thus contains a lot of pages. This project would involve porting most of the pages to markdown so as to make the website faster and easier to develop.
The second part of the project involves updating Season of KDE website. The goal is to use more modern tooling and add some new features. This project is a part of the transition of KDE websites from LDAP to OAuth based authentication. OAuth is a much more modern approach to authentication and would solve some headaches with the current authentication system.
Screencasts/Audiocasts/Shows: Ubuntu MATE 20.04 LTS, BSD Now and More
A brief introduction to randomness, logs grinding netatalk to a hault, NetBSD core team changes, Using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests, WireGuard patchset for OpenBSD, FreeBSD 12.1 on a laptop, and more.
In this episode, I worked on a views and templates. There are a number of core pages that are required to flesh out the minimal interface for the app. We’re building them.
I began by showing the page that we were going to work on. I outlined the changes I planned to make, then we started.
The first thing we added was data about the school year, the main model on display in the page. I showed how to mock in the elements before adding real data.
Quarkus, a Kubernetes-native Java runtime, now fully supported by Red Hat
Java was introduced 25 years ago, and to this day, remains one of the most popular programming languages among developers. However, Java has developed a reputation for not being a good fit for cloud-native applications. Developers look for (and often choose) alternative frameworks such as Go and Node.js to support their cloud-native development requirements.
Why learn another language when you can use your existing skills? Quarkus allows Java developers to leverage their expertise to develop cloud-native, event-driven, reactive, and serverless applications. Quarkus provides a cohesive Java platform that feels familiar but new at the same time. Not only does it leverage existing Java standards, but it also provides a number of features that optimize developer joy, including live coding, unified configuration, IDE plugins, and more.
Following recent announcements, Red Hat is now ready in fully supporting Quarkus to enhance its Kubernetes support.
Quarkus is a Kubernetes-native Java stack to make the language more appealing in cloud-native use-cases. Quarkus optimizes the Java experience for containers and serverless environments.
By adding Quarkus as a supported runtime, Red Hat is helping to bring Java into the modern, cloud-native application development landscape and to approaches like microservices, containers and serverless, and enabling Java developers to continue working in the language they know and love.
Red Hat’s Quarkus, a Kubernetes-native Java stack, is now supported on the Red Hat Runtimes platform for developing cloud-native applications.
A build of Quarkus is now part of Red Hat Runtimes middleware and integrates with the Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes container platform for managing cloud deployments, Red Hat said this week.
Latest News
Graphics: Wayland in 2020, NVIDIA, AMD and Khronos
It is nearly a year since my last blog article about Wayland on Linux. Thus I thought it is time for an update on how my desktop with sway developed. What happened?
While the Tegra X1 SoC (Tegra210) has been available for several years, finally with the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel is a mainline driver contributed by NVIDIA for the video input support.
The Tegra X1 features a high-end video input controller that can support up to six MIPI CSI camera sensors concurrently.
As the first open-source code drop in two weeks, AMDVLK 2020.Q2.4 is out today as the latest update to this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver stack for Linux.
AMDVLK 2020.Q2.4 comes with improved memory allocation for systems not using any local invisible memory, command buffer prefetch is now disabled for local memory, TMZ is enabled, and a back-end optimization for kills is used. There are also several bug fixes concerning the Radeon Graphics Profiler and other targeted bug fixes.
It's been a while since hearing of OpenVG as The Khronos Group's hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics API. But today they announced a "Lite" version of OpenVG 1.1.
OpenVG 1.1 as their latest version came back in 2008 and since then there hasn't been much to report on this vector graphics API besides maintenance tasks and a short-lived OpenVG Gallium3D state tracker. Out today though is the provisional specification of OpenVG 1.1 Lite.
Ceph is the most popular storage backend for OpenStack by a wide margin, as has been reported by the OpenStack Foundation’s survey every year since its inception. In the latest survey, conducted during the Summer of 2019, Ceph outclassed other options by an even greater margin than it did in the past, with a 75% adoption rate.
Release Candidate versions are available in testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests, and also as base packages.
RPM of PHP version 7.4.7RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-test repository for Fedora 32 or remi-php74-test repository for Fedora 30-31 and Enterprise Linux 7-8.
RPM of PHP version 7.3.19RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-test repository for Fedora 30-31 or remi-php73-test repository for Enterprise Linux.
Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Learn more about the features listed here through the provided links or from the list on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 84 is beta as of May 28, 2020.
Following the recent Chrome 83 release, Chrome 84 has now been promoted to beta.
The Chrome 84 Beta is bringing Web OTP API (SMS Receiver API) support on Android, significant improvements to its Web Animations API implementation, WebAssembly SIMD support with a 128-bit value type is now available via the Origin trials (experimental functionality) along with a Cookie Store API, Idle Detection API, and other trial features.
With more and more people buying laptops to work or learn from home, a lot of folks are probably looking into the prospect of switching to a lighter, cheaper Chromebook instead of a traditional Windows or Mac laptop. Chromebooks come at a wide range of price points and with a variety of features, but the big question for most people is about Chrome OS itself. How hard is it to switch? What are Android apps like? Does Linux support really work, and how well? Do Chromebooks make good tablets? Can I use Firefox on one? We'll cover as much of that as we can in this post.
Helping kids with school work can be challenging in the best of times (“new” math anyone?) let alone during a worldwide pandemic. These Firefox features can help make managing school work, and remote summer classes if those are on your horizon, a little easier.
I recently upgraded my aging “fast” build machine. Back when I assembled the machine, it could do a full clobber build of Firefox in about 10 minutes. That was slightly more than 10 years ago. This upgrade, and the build times I’m getting on the brand new machine (now 6 months old) and other machines led me to look at how some parameters influence build times.
[...]
The XPS13 being old, it is subject to thermal throttling, making it slower than it should be, but it wouldn’t beat the 10 years old desktop anyway. Macbook Pros tend to get into these thermal issues after a while too.
I’ve relied on laptops for a long time. My previous laptop before this XPS was another XPS, that is now about 6 to 7 years old, and while the newer one had more RAM, it was barely getting better build times compared to the older one when I switched. The evolution of laptop performance has been underwelming for a long time, but things finally changed last year. At long last.
I wish I had numbers with a more recent laptop under the same OS as the XPS for fairer comparison. Or with the more recent larger laptops that sport even more cores, especially the fancy ones with Ryzen processors.
My team keeps snippets, which kinda-sorta feels like a blog-like interface for sharing context. We keep our snippets in a google doc largely because it has a low barrier to entry and it's a fast solution. However, I find that keeping snippets in a doc really limits the value I personally get from keeping a weekly log. Ostensibly, the value to writing snippets is keeping my team up to date on my work. However, I find that the secondary personal benefits are the ones that keep me motivated to write updates.
IMPORTANT: Firefox 78 is the next ESR (Extended Support Release) version. That’s a more stable version designed for enterprises, but also used in some Linux distributions, and it remains supported for about a year. Once Firefox 78 moves to release, that content will remain frozen until that version becomes unsupported (about 15 months), so it’s important to ship the best localization possible.
The programme may be new, but the process has been shaping for years: In March 2020, Mozilla officially launched a dedicated Environmental Sustainability Programme, and I am proud and excited to be stewarding our efforts.
Since we launched, the world has been held captive by the COVID-19 pandemic. People occasionally ask me, “Is this really the time to build up and invest in such a large-scale, ambitious programme?” My answer is clear: Absolutely.
Facebook is squarely in the crosshairs of global competition regulators, but despite that scrutiny, is moving to acquire Giphy, a popular platform that lets users share images on social platforms, such as Facebook, or messaging applications, such as WhatsApp. This merger – how it is reviewed, whether it is approved, and if approved under what sort of conditions – will set a precedent that will influence not only future mergers, but also the shape of legislative reforms being actively developed all around the world. It is crucial that antitrust agencies incorporate into their processes a deep understanding of the nature of the open internet and how it promotes competition, how data flows between integrated services, and in particular the role played by interoperability.
Currently Giphy is integrated with numerous independent social messaging services, including, for example, Slack, Signal, and Twitter. A combined Facebook-Giphy would be in a position to restrict access by those companies, whether to preserve their exclusivity or to get leverage for some other reason. This would bring clear harm to users who would suddenly lose the capabilities they currently enjoy, and make it harder for other companies to compete.
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