2026-02-15 00:29:50
Version 9.2 of the
Vim text editor has been released. "Vim 9.2 brings significant
enhancements to the Vim9 scripting language, improved diff mode,
comprehensive completion features, and platform-specific improvements
including experimental Wayland support.
" Also included is a new
interactive tutor mode.
2026-02-13 23:38:20
Debian Project Leader (DPL) Andreas Tille has announced a new delegation for Debian's data protection team:
Following the end of the previous delegation, Debian was left without an active Data Protection team. This situation has understandably drawn external attention and highlighted the importance of having a clearly identified point of contact for data protection matters within the project.
I am therefore very pleased to announce that new volunteers have stepped forward, allowing us to re-establish the Debian Data Protection team with a fresh delegation.
Tille had put out a call for volunteers in January after all previous members of the team had stepped down. He has appointed Aigars Mahinovs, Andrew M.A. Cater, Bart Martens, Emmanuel Arias, Gunnar Wolf, Kiran S Kunjumon, and Salvo Tomaselli as the new members of the team. The team provides a central coordination and advisory function around Debian's data handling, retention, dealing with deletion requests, and more.
2026-02-13 23:32:24
The merge window for Linux 7.0 has opened, and with it comes a number of interesting improvements and enhancements. At the time of writing, there have been 7,695 non-merge commits accepted. The 7.0 release is not special, according to the kernel's versioning scheme — just the release that comes after 6.19. Humans love symbolism and round numbers, though, so it may feel like something of a milestone.
2026-02-13 23:17:51
At FOSDEM 2026 Petya
Kangalova, a senior tech partnership and engagement manager for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap
Team (HOT) spoke about how
the project helps people map their surroundings to assist in
disaster response and humanitarian aid. The project has
developed a stack of technology to help volunteers collectively map an
area and add in local knowledge metadata. "One of the core things
that we believe is that when we speak about disaster response or
people having access to data is that they really need accessible
technology that's free and open for anyone to use
."
2026-02-13 22:06:45
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, gcc-toolset-14-binutils, nodejs:20, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, php:7.4, and python3.12), Debian (haproxy, nginx, postgresql-15, and postgresql-17), Fedora (libssh), Oracle (glib2, libsoup, nodejs:20, nodejs:22, and php:7.4), SUSE (assimp, gnutls, helm, kernel, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-exportproxy-container, virt-exportserver-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-t, libmunge2, libsodium, libsoup, micropython, munge, openCryptoki, python-azure-core, rust-keylime, rustup, sccache, snpguest, tcpreplay, xorg-x11-server, xrdp, and zabbix), and Ubuntu (dnsdist, dotnet8, dotnet9, dotnet10, haproxy, libpng1.6, linux-aws-5.15, linux-azure, linux-azure-fips, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, munge, nginx, and node-dottie).
2026-02-13 00:55:04
Web sites are being increasingly beset by AI scraperbots — a problem that we have written about before, and which has slowly ramped up to an occasional de-facto DDoS attack. This has not gone uncontested, however: web site operators from around the world have been working on inventive countermeasures. These solutions target the problem posed by scraperbots in different ways; iocaine, a MIT-licensed nonsense generator, is designed to make scraped text less useful by poisoning it with fake data. The hope is to make running scraperbots not economically viable, and thereby address the problem at its root instead of playing an eternal game of Whac-A-Mole.