2026-02-17 23:22:40
Various forms of tools, colloquially known as "AI", have been rapidly pervading all aspects of open-source development. Many developers are embracing LLM tools for code creation and review. Some project maintainers complain about suffering from a deluge of slop-laden pull requests, as well as fabricated bug and security reports. Too many projects are reeling from scraperbot attacks that effectively DDoS important infrastructure. But an AI bot flaming an open-source maintainer was not on our bingo card for 2026; that seemed a bit too far-fetched. However, it appears that is just what happened recently after a project rejected a bot-driven pull request.
2026-02-17 23:04:53
Version 6.6.0 of KDE's Plasma desktop environment has been released. Notable additions in this release include the ability to create global themes for Plasma, an "extract text" feature in the Spectacle screenshot utility, accessibility improvements, and a new on-screen keyboard. See the changelog for a full list of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes.
The release is dedicated to the memory of Björn Balazs, a KDE
contributor who passed away in September 2025. "Björn's drive to
help people achieve the privacy and control over technology that he
believed they deserved is the stuff FLOSS legends are made of.
"
2026-02-17 22:44:12
In December 2025, Canonical announced a plan to develop a universal Public Key Infrastructure called upki. Jon Seager has published an update about the project with instructions on trying it out.
In the few weeks since we announced upki, the core revocation engine has been established and is now functional, the CRLite mirroring tool is working and a production deployment in Canonical's datacentres is ongoing. We're now preparing for an alpha release and remain on track for an opt-in preview for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.
2026-02-17 22:02:06
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gimp, go-toolset:rhel8, and golang), Debian (roundcube), Fedora (gnupg2, libpng, and rsync), Mageia (dcmtk and usbmuxd), Oracle (gcc-toolset-14-binutils, gimp, gnupg2, go-toolset:ol8, golang, kernel, and openssl), Slackware (libssh, lrzip, and mozilla), SUSE (abseil-cpp, chromium, curl, elemental-toolkit, elemental-operator, expat, freerdp, iperf, libnvidia-container, libsoup, libxml2, net-snmp, openCryptoki, openssl-3, patch, protobuf, python-urllib3, python-xmltodict, python311, screen, systemd, and util-linux), and Ubuntu (alsa-lib, gnutls28, and linux-aws, linux-oracle).
2026-02-17 03:13:36
The curl project has found AI-powered tools to be a mixed bag when it comes to security reports. At FOSDEM 2026, curl creator and lead developer Daniel Stenberg used his keynote session to discuss his experience receiving a slew of low-quality reports and, at the same time, realizing that large language model (LLM) tools can sometimes find flaws that other tools have missed.
2026-02-17 00:32:42
Greg-Kroah Hartman has released the 6.19.2, 6.18.12, 6.12.73, and 6.6.126 stable kernels. These kernels
each contain a single change; Kroah-Hartman has reverted one
problematic commit that prevents some systems from booting. "If the
last stable release worked just fine, no need to upgrade.
"