2026-02-25 23:27:45
On February 12, Yeoreum Yun posted a suggestion for an improvement to the security of the kernel's BPF implementation: use memory protection keys to prevent unauthorized access to memory by BPF programs. Yun wanted to put the topic on the list for discussion at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit in May, but the lack of engagement makes that unlikely. They also have a patch set implementing some of the proposed changes, but has not yet shared that with the mailing list. Yun's proposal does not seem likely to be accepted in its current form, but the kernel has added hardware-based hardening options in the past, sometimes after substantial discussion.
2026-02-25 22:26:21
The Network Time Protocol (NTP) debuted in 1985; it is a universally used, open specification that is deeply important for all sorts of activities we take for granted. It also, despite a number of efforts, remains stubbornly unsecured. Ruben Nijveld presented work at FOSDEM 2026 to speed adoption of the thus-far largely ignored standard for securing NTP traffic: IETF's RFC-8915 that specifies Network Time Security (NTS) for NTP.
2026-02-25 22:22:16
The MetaBrainz Foundation has announced the unexpected passing of its founder and executive director, Robert Kaye:
Robert's vision and leadership shaped MetaBrainz and left a lasting mark on the music industry and open source movement. His contributions were significant and his loss is deeply felt across our global community.
The Board is actively overseeing a smooth leadership transition and has measures in place to ensure that MetaBrainz continues to operate without interruption. Further updates will be shared in due course.
2026-02-25 22:08:37
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (grafana and grafana-pcp), Debian (gnutls28), Fedora (chromium and yt-dlp), Oracle (389-ds-base, kernel, munge, and openssl), Red Hat (buildah, containernetworking-plugins, opentelemetry-collector, podman, runc, and skopeo), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (chromium, cosign, firefox, freerdp, gimp, heroic-games-launcher, kernel, libopenssl-3-devel, libxml2, libxslt, mosquitto, openqa, os-autoinst, openqa-devel-container, openvswitch, phpunit, postgresql14, postgresql15, postgresql16, protobuf, python310, python311-PyPDF2, python36, snpguest, warewulf4, and weblate), and Ubuntu (curl, kernel, linux, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-oracle, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-gcp-fips, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-6.8, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-realtime, linux-raspi-realtime, linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8, and linux-xilinx).
2026-02-25 07:20:35
LibreOffice online is a web-based version of the LibreOffice suite that can be hosted on anybody's infrastructure. This project was put into stasis back in 2022, a move marked by some tension with Collabora, a major LibreOffice developer that has its own online offering. Now, the Document Foundation has announced a new effort to breathe life into this project.
We plan to reopen the repository for LibreOffice Online at The Document Foundation for contributions, but provide warnings about the state of the repository until TDF's team agrees that it's safe and usable – while at the same time encourage the community to join in with code, technologies and other contributions that can be used to move forward.
Meanwhile, this post from Michael Meeks suggests that the tension around online versions of LibreOffice has not abated.
2026-02-25 00:22:48
Version 5.4.0 of GNU awk (gawk) has been released. This is a major release with a change in gawk's default regular-expression matcher: it now uses MinRX as the default regular-expression engine.
This matcher is fully POSIX compliant, which the current GNU matchers are not. In particular it follows POSIX rules for finding the longest leftmost submatches. It is also more strict as to regular expression syntax, but primarily in a few corner cases that normal, correct, regular expression usage should not encounter.
Because regular expression matching is such a fundamental part of awk/gawk, the original GNU matchers are still included in gawk. In order to use them, give a value to the GAWK_GNU_MATCHERS environment variable before invoking gawk.
[...] The original GNU matchers will eventually be removed from gawk. So, please take the time to notice and report any issues in the MinRX matcher, so that they can be ironed out sooner rather than later.
See the release announcement for additional changes.