Things look fairly normal, although we do have a few different projects to cull some old hardware support to help minimize maintenance burden: phasing out i486 support (configs deleted, code deletions to follow) and independently starting to remove some really old networking hardware support, and removing some SoC support that never went anywhere.

But we're more than making up for any stale code removal with all the new features and code added, so the diffstat still shows many more lines added than removed.

Werner Koch has announced the release of GnuPG 2.5.19. This release includes a few new options and a number of bug fixes, and comes with the reminder that the GnuPG 2.4 series will reach end-of-life soon

The main features in the 2.5 series are improvements for 64 bit Windows and the introduction of Kyber (aka ML-KEM or FIPS-203) as PQC encryption algorithm. Other than PQC support the 2.6 series will not differ a lot from 2.4 because the majority of changes are internal to make use of newer features from the supporting libraries.

Note that the old 2.4 series reaches end-of-life in just two months. Thus update to 2.5.19 in time. As always with GnuPG new versions are fully compatible with previous versions.

LWN recently covered Fedora's discussion about what to offer after GnuPG 2.4 is no longer supported.

Ubuntu 26.04 ("Resolute Raccoon") LTS has been released on schedule.

This release brings a significant uplift in security, performance, and usability across desktop, server, and cloud environments. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS introduces TPM-backed full-disk encryption, expanded use of memory-safe components, improved application permission controls, and Livepatch support for Arm systems, helping reduce downtime and strengthen system resilience. [...]

The newest Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Unity, and Xubuntu are also being released today. For more details on these, read their individual release notes under the Official flavors section:

https://documentation.ubuntu.com/release-notes/26.04/#official-flavors

Maintenance updates will be provided for 5 years for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu WSL, and Ubuntu Core. All the remaining flavors will be supported for 3 years.

See the release notes for a list of changes, system requirements, and more.

• Front: LLMs and Python bugs; scheduler regression; new Rust traits; dependency cooldowns; 7.1 merge window; Shor's algorithm; drama at The Document Foundation.
• Briefs: Firefox zero-days; kernel code removal; reproduceible Arch; Debian election; Firefox 150; Forgejo 15.0; Git 2.54.0; KDE Gear 26.04; LillyPond 2.26.0; Rust 1.95.0; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Efforts to introduce malicious code into the open-source supply chain have been on the rise in recent years, and there is no indication that they will abate anytime soon. These attacks are often found quickly, but not quickly enough to prevent the compromised code from being automatically injected into other projects or code deployed by users where it can wreak havoc. One method of avoiding supply-chain attacks is to add a delay of a few days before pulling upates in what is known as a "dependency cooldown". That tactic is starting to find favor with users and some language ecosystem package managers. While this practice is considered a reasonable response by many, others are complaining that those employing dependency cooldowns are free-riding on the larger community by letting others take the risk.

In Rust, types either possess a constant size known at compile time, or a dynamically calculated size known at run time. That is fine for most purposes, but recent proposals for the language have shown the need for a more fine-grained hierarchy. RFC 3729 from David Wood and Rémy Rakic would add a hierarchy of traits to describe types with sizes known under different circumstances. While the idea has been subject to discussion for many years, a growing number of use cases for the feature have come to light.

Version 2.26.0 of the LilyPond music-engraving program has been released. Major changes include the ability to use the Cairo library to generate output and improvements in spacing between clefs and time signatures. See the release notes for a full list of miscellaneous improvements as well as what's new with musical and specialist notation.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.1, 6.19.14, 6.18.24, and 6.12.83 stable kernels. As usual, each contains important fixes throughout the tree. Users are encouraged to upgrade.

Note that the 6.19.x series ends with 6.19.14.

Remove the amateur radio (AX.25, NET/ROM, ROSE) protocol implementation and all associated hamradio device drivers from the kernel tree. This set of protocols has long been a huge bug/syzbot magnet, and since nobody stepped up to help us deal with the influx of the AI-generated bug reports we need to move it out of tree to protect our sanity.

Elite security researchers find bugs that fuzzers can't largely by reasoning through the source code. This is effective, but time-consuming and bottlenecked on scarce human expertise. Computers were completely incapable of doing this a few months ago, and now they excel at it. We have many years of experience picking apart the work of the world's best security researchers, and Mythos Preview is every bit as capable. So far we've found no category or complexity of vulnerability that humans can find that this model can't.

This can feel terrifying in the immediate term, but it's ultimately great news for defenders. A gap between machine-discoverable and human-discoverable bugs favors the attacker, who can concentrate many months of costly human effort to find a single bug. Closing this gap erodes the attacker's long-term advantage by making all discoveries cheap.

The Fedora Project has been wrestling with the question of who should be able to vote in Fedora elections recently, with project membership being a major topic at the Fedora Council face-to-face held in early February. Now the project is considering a new contributor status, "Fedora Verified", and is looking to get input on the idea from the community.

What are the proposed benefits? The primary motivation behind "Fedora Verified" is to build trust-based recognition that grants elevated, privileged rights within the project. Most notably, this status would determine eligibility for strategic governance activities, such as:

• Voting in Fedora community elections.
• Running for leadership or decision-making roles within the project (i.e., Fedora Council, FESCo, Mindshare Committee, EPEL Steering Committee).
• (Potential, unplanned) Accessing specific shared project resources or educational opportunities (e.g., Red Hat training credits).

The blog post includes a list of proposed baseline metrics for "Verified" status as well as open questions to be decided. A survey on the topic will be open until May 5.

Version 150 of the Firefox web browser has been released. Notable changes include local-network-access restrictions being turned on for all users, the ability to reorder, copy, delete, paste, and export pages from a PDF using Firefox's built-in viewer, as well as improvements in its split view feature, and more. See also the release notes for developers and list of security fixes in this release.

(Update: Mozilla seems to have removed the local-network-access restrictions information since the release was published yesterday.)