Vue normale
SUSE may be for sale, again
Reuters is reporting that private-equity firm EQT may be looking to sell SUSE:
EQT has hired investment bank Arma Partners to sound out a group of private equity investors for a possible sale of the company, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential matters. The deliberations are at an early stage and there is no certainty that EQT will proceed with a transaction, the sources said.
SUSE has traded hands a number of times over the years. Most recently it was acquired by EQT in 2018, was listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2021, and then taken private again by EQT in August 2023.
[$] Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions
Debian is the latest in an ever-growing list of projects to wrestle (again) with the question of LLM-generated contributions; the latest debate stared in mid-February, after Lucas Nussbaum opened a discussion with a draft general resolution (GR) on whether Debian should accept AI-assisted contributions. It seems to have, mostly, subsided without a GR being put forward or any decisions being made, but the conversation was illuminating nonetheless.
Security updates for Tuesday
[$] Inspecting and modifying Python types during type checking
Python has a unique approach to static typing. Python programs can contain type annotations, and even access those annotations at run time, but the annotations aren't evaluated by default. Instead, it is up to external programs to ascribe meaning to those annotations. The annotations themselves can be arbitrary Python expressions, but in practice usually involve using helpers from the built-in typing module, the meanings of which external type-checkers mostly agree upon. Yet the type system implicitly defined by the typing module and common type-checkers is insufficiently powerful to model all of the kinds of dynamic metaprogramming found in real-world Python programs. PEP 827 ("Type Manipulation") aims to add additional capabilities to Python's type system to fix this, but discussion of the PEP has been of mixed sentiment.
digiKam 9.0.0 released
Version
9.0.0 of the digiKam photo-management system has been
released. "This major version introduces groundbreaking
improvements in performance, usability, and workflow efficiency, with
a strong focus on modernizing the user interface, enhancing metadata
management, and expanding support for new camera models and file
formats.
" Some of the changes include a
new survey tool, more advanced search and sorting options, as well
as bulk
editing of geolocation coordinates.
Security updates for Monday
Kernel prepatch 7.0-rc3
So it's still pretty early in the release cycle, and it just feels a bit busier than I'd like. But nothing particularly stands out or looks bad."
Huston: Revisiting time
NTP operates in the clear, and it is often the case that the servers used by a client are not local. This provides an opportunity for an adversary to disrupt an NTP session, by masquerading as a NTP server, or altering NTP payloads in an effort to disrupt a client's time-of-day clock. Many application-level protocols are time sensitive, including TLS, HTTPS, DNSSEC and NFS. Most Cloud applications rely on a coordinated time to determine the most recent version of a data object. Disrupting time can cause significant chaos in distributed network environments.While it can be relatively straightforward to secure a TCP-based protocol by adding an initial TLS handshake and operating a TLS shim between TCP and the application traffic, it's not so straightforward to use TLS in place of a UDP-based protocol for NTP. TLS can add significant jitter to the packet exchange. Where the privacy of the UDP payload is essential, then DTLS might conceivably be considered, but in the case of NTP the privacy of the timestamps is not essential, but the veracity and authenticity of the server is important.
NTS, a secured version of NTP, is designed to address this requirement relating to the veracity and authenticity of packets passed from a NTS server to an NTS client. The protocol adds a NTS Key Establishment protocol (NTS-KE) in additional to a conventional NTPv4 UDP packet exchange (RFC 8915).
[$] Fedora shares strategy updates and "weird research university" model
In early February, members of the Fedora Council met in Tirana, Albania to discuss and set the strategic direction for the Fedora Project. The council has published summaries from its strategy summit, and Fedora Project Leader (FPL) Jef Spaleta, as well as some of the council members, held a video meeting to discuss outcomes from the summit on February 25. Topics included a plan to experiment with Open Collective to raise funds for specific Fedora projects, tools to build image-based editions, and more. Spaleta also explained his model for Fedora governance.
OpenWrt 25.12.0 released
Security updates for Friday
Rust 1.94.0 released
A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4,000 Developer Machines (grith.ai)
For the next eight hours, every developer who installed or updated Cline got OpenClaw - a separate AI agent with full system access - installed globally on their machine without consent. Approximately 4,000 downloads occurred before the package was pulled.The interesting part is not the payload. It is how the attacker got the npm token in the first place: by injecting a prompt into a GitHub issue title, which an AI triage bot read, interpreted as an instruction, and executed.
[$] The relicensing of chardet
Buildroot 2026.02 released
Peter Korsgaard has announced version 2026.02 of Buildroot, a tool for generating embedded Linux systems through cross-compilation. Notable changes include added support for HPPA, use of the 6.19.x kernel headers by default, better SBOM generation, and more.
Again a very active cycle with more than 1500 changes from 97 unique contributors. I'm once again very happy to see so many "new" people next to the "oldtimers".
See the changelog for full details. Thanks to Julien Olivain for pointing us to the announcement.
New stable kernels to address build failures
[$] Reconsidering the multi-generational LRU
Security updates for Thursday
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 5, 2026
- Front: Python's bitwise-inversion operator; atomic buffered I/O; keeping open source open; Magit and Majutsu; IIIF; free software and free tools.
- Briefs: Ad tracking; firmware updates; TCP zero-copy; Motorola GrapheneOS phones; Gram 1.0; groff 1.24.0; Texinfo 7.3; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.