Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.11, 6.18.34, 6.12.92, 6.6.142, 6.1.175, 5.15.209, and 5.10.258 stable kernels. As usual, each contains important fixes throughout the tree, including a fix for the "CIFSwitch" vulnerability (CVE-2026-46243) which could allow a local-privilege-escalation exploit. Users are advised to upgrade.

StepSecurity is reporting that a number of npm packages in the @redhat-cloud-services scope include malware that runs automatically on every npm install:

The payload is a multi-stage credential harvester that sweeps GitHub Actions secrets along with AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, HashiCorp Vault, npm, and CircleCI tokens, and it is purpose-built to evade detection, including an explicit attempt to bypass StepSecurity Harden-Runner.

StepSecurity analyzed @redhat-cloud-services/host-inventory-client@5.0.3 in full. Its index.js, executed at install time, is 4.2 MB, a file that should weigh a few kilobytes, with the real payload buried under three separate layers of obfuscation. The malware is also a self-propagating worm: using stolen npm tokens and npm's bypass_2fa parameter, it republishes backdoored versions of other packages on its own, even against accounts protected by two-factor authentication, so every infected machine can seed the next wave with no attacker involvement. All affected packages were published via GitHub Actions OIDC from the RedHatInsights/javascript-clients repository, indicating the upstream CI/CD pipeline itself was compromised. Analysis of the remaining packages is ongoing.

A blog post from SafeDep has additional analysis about the incident. We did not find an advisory from Red Hat on this yet.

The Fedora Project has published interviews with candidates running for the open seats on the Fedora Council, Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, Fedora Mindshare Committee, and EPEL Steering Committee. Voting is open through Friday, June 12 at 23:59 UTC.

Andrew Nesbitt has written a blog post detailing a recent incident with the jqwik library for property-based testing in Java. On May 25, the 1.10.0 release of jqwik included a change that attempts to instruct coding agents to disregard previous instructions and delete jqwik tests and code.

I think this is a new class of supply-chain input worth keeping an eye on, mostly because of how little of the existing tooling has any opinion about it. A System.out.print of sixty-eight bytes of plain ASCII isn't the kind of thing scanners are looking for, since those watch for install hooks, network calls, filesystem writes, obfuscated strings and the like. The jar makes the same syscalls it made in 1.9, and because the change was committed and released by the legitimate maintainer through the normal build, it's clean from a SLSA point of view too: the provenance is what it should be. Anyone who reads the diff can see what it does, but a patch bump of a test-scoped dependency is not where most projects spend their review time.

Gentoo developer Michał Górny has written a lengthy article explaining the philosophy and purpose of the Gentoo Linux distribution, in response to a thread on Mastodon:

Gentoo is a source-first distribution, which means the primary method of installing software is to build it from source. Of course, that doesn't mean manually building stuff, following some kind of how-to: finding all the dependencies, installing them manually, going through a series of magical incantations, and eventually ending up no better than if we were installing a binary package. The package manager takes care of all the necessary steps and more, making package installs easy; well, at least unless something fails. But I'm digressing...

[...] We try to build a friendly and welcoming community around Gentoo, and we truly want using Gentoo be an enjoyable experience. We want it to be a system that doesn't betray you.

Many large language models (LLMs) are described as open source, but if one looks a bit deeper it turns out that is not actually so; the model may be free to download, it may be "open weight", but it does not fit the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Open Source Definition (OSD). Assessing the actual openness of models is not easy, as Arnaud Le Hors explained in his talk about the Model Openness Tool (MOT) at Open Source Summit North America 2026. The tool is designed to help users of LLMs understand to what degree a model is (or is not) open, and to combat the openwashing that is prevalent with LLMs.

Rodrigo Arias Mallo, maintainer of the Dillo web browser, has written a blog post with a proposal on one way to ensure that a contribution is written by a human and not AI; he suggests asking new contributors to record their programming session using asciinema.

In the same way that LLMs generate patches, they can also generate the asciinema recordings themselves. Then, the contributors can lie to the reviewers pretending to have made the edits. Perhaps surprisingly, this is not a easy task for LLMs, at least from my observations. The corpus of recordings of developers making mistakes and thinking the whole process of editing a file is not as large as the corpus of FOSS programs and patches in which to train an LLM. During my very simple tests I haven't been able to generate an asciinema session that remotely resembles what I would expect from a human, and even less so from a human with a nice editor theme and editing an existing Dillo source file.

The Dillo project is not yet requiring asciinema recordings, but he said that he would like to test the theory further. LWN covered asciinema in January 2026.

Linus Torvalds does not enjoy giving talks, but he does consent to the occasional on-stage conversation with Dirk Hohndel at Linux Foundation events. The pair held the 30th of their fire-less fireside chats during a keynote session on May 20, at the 2026 Open Source Summit North America. Topics included 3D printing, guitar pedals, the recent 7.1-rc4 release of the kernel, and Torvalds's complicated relationship with AI tooling.

The OpenPGP Email Summit is an annual meeting for those who work on encrypted email and related topics. The tenth installment of this meeting took place in March 2026 and the minutes have now been published. As usual, a wide range of topics were discussed. Highlights included support for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) with multiple actors planning rollouts within this year, a promising new approach for making email signatures ubiquitous with the plan of making OpenPGP signed email a default, a new draft that brings reliable deletion (or "forward secrecy") features to OpenPGP, as well as a plan for transferring ownership of the OpenPGP.org domain.

Many people in the Linux community began using the operating system—and contributing to open source—at a tender age, often well before their 16th birthday. Thus, a recent change in openSUSE's terms of site (ToS) that required users of the project's web site to be "at least 16 years of age or the age of majority" in their jurisdiction has raised objections. The terms have since been modified, though users must still have parental approval to create accounts if they are younger than 16.

In April, David Steele, maintainer of the popular pgBackRest backup and restore project for PostgreSQL, announced that he had archived the project and it would no longer be maintained due to lack of sponsorship. On May 18, he announced that a number of sponsors have stepped forward to ensure its continued development:

Over the last few weeks, a coalition of sponsors has come together to fund ongoing development. Their support means the project is no longer reliant on a single sponsor, giving pgBackRest the stability it needs for the long term.

[...] I'm looking forward to getting back to work. There are features and optimizations in the pipeline that I'm excited to share in upcoming releases. Thank you to our sponsors for making this possible, and thank you to the community for your patience and support during this transition.

Thanks to Paul Wise for the tip.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the 7.0.8, 6.18.31, 6.12.89, 6.6.139, 6.1.173, 5.15.207, and 5.10.256 stable kernels. These kernels contain a patch for CVE-2026-46333 a vulnerability reported by the Qualys Security Advisory team, though Jann Horn proposed a patch in 2020. The vulnerability has a proof-of-concept exploit published already. Some of the kernels have additional patches for other bugs; as always, users are advised to upgrade.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.7, 6.18.30, and 6.12.88 stable kernels. These kernels do not include a patch for the Fragnesia local-privilege-escalation exploit that came to light on May 13, but do include many other important fixes throughout the tree. Users are, as always, advised to upgrade.