Safe, ergonomic interoperability between Rust and C/C++ was a popular topic at RustConf 2025 in Seattle, Washington. Chandler Carruth gave a presentation about the different approaches to interoperability in Rust and Carbon, the experimental "(C++)++" language. His ultimate conclusion was that while Rust's ability to interface with other languages is expanding over time, it wouldn't offer a complete solution to C++ interoperability anytime soon — and so there is room for Carbon to take a different approach to incrementally upgrading existing C++ projects. His slides are available for readers wishing to study his example code in more detail.

A malicious update to @ctrl/tinycolor (2.2M weekly downloads) was detected on npm as part of a broader supply chain attack that impacted more than 40 packages spanning multiple maintainers.

The compromised versions include a function (NpmModule.updatePackage) that downloads a package tarball, modifies package.json, injects a local script (bundle.js), repacks the archive, and republishes it, enabling automatic trojanization of downstream packages.

There is some more information in this Krebs on Security article.

Brooke Deuson is the developer behind Trafficking Free Tomorrow, a nonprofit organization that produces free software to help law enforcement combat human trafficking. She is a survivor of human trafficking herself. She spoke at RustConf 2025 about her mission, and why she chose to write her anti-trafficking software in Rust. Interestingly, it has nothing to do with Rust's lifetime-analysis-based memory-safety — instead, her choice was motivated by the difficulty she faces getting police departments to actually use her software. The fact that Rust is statically linked and capable of cross compilation by default makes deploying Rust software in those environments easier.

The move also comes with a name change due to legal difficulties in securing the Varnish Cache name:

The new association and the new project will be named "The Vinyl Cache Project", and this release 8.0.0, will be the last under the "Varnish Cache" name. The next release, in March will be under the new name, and will include compatility scripts, to make the transition as smooth as possible for everybody.

I want to make it absolutely clear that this is 100% a mess of my making: I should have insisted on a firm written agreement about the name sharing, but I did not.

I will also state for the record, that there are no hard feelings between Varnish Software and the FOSS project.

Varnish Software has always been, and still is, an important and valued contributor to the FOSS project, but sometimes even friends can make a mess of a situation.

As part of our legal resilience research, we spoke with a range of legal experts, software freedom advocates, and maintainers of mature FOSS infrastructure to understand how others manage these moments. In this article, we share what we learned, and how F-Droid is incorporating these lessons into its own approach.

• Front: Space Grade Linux; KDE's new distribution; Rug pulls and forks; Dependency tracker; Kernel configuration; Framework 12 laptop.
• Briefs: npm security; high-memory; Anaconda WebUI; OpenSUSE bcachefs; 32-bit Firefox; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

There are a large number of ways to configure the 6.16 Linux kernel. It has 32,468 different configuration options on x86_64, and a comparable number for other platforms. Exploring the ways the kernel can be configured is sufficiently difficult that it requires specialized tools. These show the number of possible configurations that options can be combined in has 6,550 digits. How has that number changed over the history of the kernel, and what does it mean for testing?

At Akademy 2025, the KDE Project released an alpha version of KDE Linux, a distribution built by the project to "include the best implementation of everything KDE has to offer, using the most advanced technologies". It is aimed at providing an operating system suitable for home use, business use, OEM installations, and more "eventually". For now there are many rough edges and missing features that users should be aware of before taking the plunge; but it is an interesting look at the kind of complete Linux system that KDE developers would like to see.