Firefox 82 is Out with New Sync Options, Malicious Download Blocking

Firefox 82 is due for formal release later today (October 20) but as that tend to happen when I’m in bed I’m posting this post a tiny bit early. Firefox 82 downloads are up on the release server. Indeed, feature development for Firefox seems to be slowing down in general — Mozilla did recently sack a sizeable chunk of the brower’s development team — but a welcome round of enhancements and changes are available through this uplift.

Ubuntu and Debian Get Patches for Bluetooth Remote Code Execution Flaws, Update Now

Discovered by security researcher Andy Nguyen in Linux kernel's Bluetooth L2CAP and Bluetooth A2MP implementation, as well as the Bluetooth HCI event packet parser, the CVE-2020-12351, CVE-2020-12352, and CVE-2020-24490 vulnerabilities are affecting Debian GNU/Linux 10, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. While CVE-2020-12351 and CVE-2020-24490 could allow a physically proximate remote attacker to crash the system by causing a denial of service or execute arbitrary code, CVE-2020-12352 let physically proximate remote attackers to expose sensitive information (kernel memory).

Graphics: Intel, AMD and Vulkan

• Intel Lands A Hefty Tiger Lake Graphics Optimization - Phoronix

  From my Tiger Lake testing so far with the Core i7 1165G7, the "Gen12" Xe Graphics have been quite compelling with a very nice upgrade over Gen11 and especially obvious win over the very common still Gen9 graphics. With Mesa 20.3, another measurable performance is on the way for the Intel Vulkan driver with Tiger Lake. For Tiger Lake (and theoretically Rocket Lake as well), a new and significant optimization landed today in Mesa 20.3-devel. The optimization applies for Intel Gen12 graphics except for discrete/DG1 graphics.

• Vulkan Specification Version 1.2.158 Brings Two New Extensions

  Version 1.2.158 of the Vulkan specification introduces VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate that lets developers change the rate at which fragments are shaded on a per-region, per-primitive or per-draw basis and VK_KHR_shader_terminate_invocation which, together with the previously introduced VK_EXT_shader_demote_to_helper_invocation extension, lets developers do a much more specific OpKill.

• Open-Source RADV Vulkan Driver Is Seeing Work To Allow Building It On Windows - Phoronix

  An independent party has slowly begun merging patches into mainline Mesa for allowing the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" to build on Microsoft Windows. AMD is not behind this effort nor Valve but has been worked on in recent months for making Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver code compatible with Windows. James Park of a little known "Lag Free Games" has been behind this initiative to bringing it to Windows and seemingly only explaining in private to upstream Mesa developers his motivations for doing so. RADV as a reminder is the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver started out by David Airlie of Red Hat and Bas Nieuwenhuizen of Google in the time while waiting for AMD to open-source their Vulkan driver. AMD ultimately provided "AMDVLK" as their official open-source Vulkan driver derived from their internal Vulkan driver sources and built against the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end.

Today in Techrights

• There Are Too Many Types of Cars...
• Reversal of Narratives by Internet Trolls (Spinning Reaction to Their Trolling as 'Abuse')
• Ongoing (Albeit Secret) Campaign of Patent Extortion Against GNU/Linux Distributions Using Software Patents, Even Expired Ones in Europe
• Links 19/10/2020: Linux 5.9-ck1/MuQSS, Linux Kodachi 7.3
• Java's James Gosling is Wrong. Free Software Advocates Never Suggested or Insinuated That Money-Making Was Ethically Wrong.
• Maybe This is What Codes of Conduct Were Made for? Or to Prevent? (Updated)
• Media Contradicts Itself, Redefines Proprietary Software as 'Open'... for Microsoft
• A Critic's Free Software Dictionary by figosdev
• IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 18, 2020
• Links 19/10/2020: OpenBSD 6.8, RapidDisk 7.0.0, Tails 4.11 Reviewed