Vue normale

Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps (Ars Technica)

Par : corbet
19 mars 2026 à 19:21
Ars Technica describes the ritual that will be required before a future Android device will deign to install apps from somewhere other than the Play Store. It is not for the impatient.

Here are the steps:
  • Enable developer options by tapping the software build number in About Phone seven times
  • In Settings > System, open Developer Options and scroll down to "Allow Unverified Packages."
  • Flip the toggle and tap to confirm you are not being coerced
  • Enter device unlock code
  • Restart your device
  • Wait 24 hours
  • Return to the unverified packages menu at the end of the security delay
  • Scroll past additional warnings and select either "Allow temporarily" (seven days) or "Allow indefinitely."
  • Check the box confirming you understand the risks.
  • You can now install unverified packages on the device by tapping the "Install anyway" option in the package manager.

Radicle 1.7.0 released

Par : jzb
19 mars 2026 à 14:25

Version 1.7.0 ("Daffodil") of the Radicle peer-to-peer, local-first code collaboration stack has been released. Some of the changes in this release include improved I/O usage, the ability to block nodes at the connection level, and clearer errors for rad id updates. See the release notes for a full list of changes and bug fixes.

[$] Development tools: Sashiko, b4 review, and API specification

Par : corbet
19 mars 2026 à 14:19
The kernel project has a unique approach to tooling that avoids many commonly used development systems that do not fit the community's scale and ways of working. Another way of looking at the situation is that the kernel project has often under-invested in tooling, and sometimes seems bent on doing things the hard way. In recent times, though, the amount of effort that has gone into development tools for the kernel has increased, with some interesting results. Recent developments in this area include the Sashiko code-review system, a patch-review manager built into b4, and a new attempt at a framework for the specification and verification of kernel APIs.

Security updates for Thursday

Par : jzb
19 mars 2026 à 13:01
Security updates have been issued by Debian (freetype), Fedora (aqualung, kiss-fft, libtasn1, mac, and vim), Red Hat (libarchive, osbuild-composer, and rhc), Slackware (expat), SUSE (ca-certificates-mozilla, chromium, cockpit, cockpit-machines, cockpit-podman, curl, docker, docker-compose, docker-stable, gnutls, gstreamer-rtsp-server, gstreamer-plugins-ugly, gstreamer- plugins-rs, gstreamer-plugins-libav, gstreamer-plugins-good, gstreamer-plugins- base, gstreamer-plugins-bad, gstreamer-docs, gstreamer-devtools, gstreamer, gvfs, helm, kernel, krb5-appl, libsoup, libxslt, libxml2, openssh, python-cryptography, python-django, python-pypdf2, python-simpleeval, python311, qemu, ruby4.0-rubygem-sprockets, ruby4.0-rubygem-thor, ruby4.0-rubygem-web-console, ruby4.0-rubygem-websocket-extensions, skaffold, smb4k, tomcat, ucode-intel, util-linux, virtiofsd, and zlib), and Ubuntu (bouncycastle, exiv2, freerdp3, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-aws-fips, python2.7, roundcube, and valkey).

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 19, 2026

Par : jzb
19 mars 2026 à 00:00
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

  • Front: Privacy battles; page-cache-timing protections; null filesystems; Fedora Sandbox; safer kmalloc(); BPF in io_uring.
  • Briefs: AppArmor vulnerabilities; snapd vulnerability; Sashiko; DPL election; Fedora Asahi 43; GIMP 3.2; Marknote 1.5; Quotes; ...
  • Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

[$] Cindy Cohn on privacy battles old and new

Par : jake
18 mars 2026 à 19:14
Cindy Cohn is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and she gave the Saturday morning keynote at SCALE 23x in Pasadena about some of the work she and others have done to help protect online rights, especially digital privacy. The talk recounted some of the history of the court cases that the organization has brought over the years to try to dial back privacy invasions. One underlying theme was the role that attendees can play in protecting our rights, hearkening back to earlier efforts by the technical community.

Samba 4.24.0 released

Par : corbet
18 mars 2026 à 17:47
Version 4.24.0 of the Samba SMB filesystem implementation has been released. There are a number of significant changes, including audit support for authentication information, remote password management, a number of Kerberos improvements, asynchronous-I/O rate limiting, and more.

GNOME 50 released

Par : jzb
18 mars 2026 à 16:59

GNOME 50 has been released. Notable changes in this release include enhancements to the Orca screen-reader application, interface and performance improvements for GNOME's file manager (Files), a "massive set of stability and performance updates" for its display-handling technologies, and much more. See also the "What's new for developers" article that covers changes of interest to GNOME and GNOME application developers.

Local-privilege escalation in snapd

Par : jzb
18 mars 2026 à 15:34

Qualys has discovered a local-privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability affecting Ubuntu Desktop 24.04 and later:

This flaw (CVE-2026-3888) allows an unprivileged local attacker to escalate privileges to full root access through the interaction of two standard system components: snap-confine and systemd-tmpfiles.

More details are available in the security advisory. Canonical has published updated packages as well as instructions for verifying if a system is vulnerable and how to upgrade if so.

Fedora Asahi Remix 43 released

Par : jzb
18 mars 2026 à 15:21

Fedora Asahi Remix 43 is now available:

This release incorporates all the exciting improvements brought by Fedora Linux 43. Notably, package management is significantly upgraded with RPM 6.0 and the new DNF5 backend for PackageKit for Plasma Discover and GNOME Software ahead of Fedora Linux 44. It also continues to provide extensive device support. This includes newly added support for the Mac Pro, microphones in M2 Pro/Max MacBooks, and 120Hz refresh rate for the built-in displays for MacBook Pro 14/16 models.

[$] BPF comes to io_uring at last

Par : daroc
18 mars 2026 à 14:57

The kernel's asynchronous io_uring interface maintains two shared ring buffers: a submission queue for sending requests to the kernel, and a completion queue containing the results of those requests. Even with shared memory removing much of the overhead of communicating with user space, there is still some overhead whenever the kernel must switch to user space to give it the opportunity to process completion requests and queue up any subsequent work items. A patch set from Pavel Begunkov minimizes this overhead by letting programmers extend the io_uring event loop with a BPF program that can enqueue additional work in response to completion events. The patch set has been in development for a long time, but has finally been accepted.

Security updates for Wednesday

Par : jzb
18 mars 2026 à 13:16
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, .NET 9.0, compat-openssl11, container-tools:rhel8, grub2, and libvpx), Debian (ansible, gst-plugins-base1.0, and nodejs), Fedora (chromium, forgejo, and systemd), Oracle (container-tools:rhel8, grub2, kernel, libpng, libvpx, nginx, opencryptoki, python3.12, and vim), Red Hat (firefox, python-wheel, python3.12-wheel, and thunderbird), SUSE (389-ds, chromium, clamav, container-suseconnect, curl, freerdp, gvfs, kea, kubernetes, ruby4.0-rubygem-minitar, ruby4.0-rubygem-multi_xml, ruby4.0-rubygem-nokogiri, ruby4.0-rubygem-puma, ruby4.0-rubygem-rack, ruby4.0-rubygem-rack-session, ruby4.0-rubygem-rails, ruby4.0-rubygem-rails-html-sanitizer, ruby4.0-rubygem-railties, ruby4.0-rubygem-rubyzip, vim, and xen), and Ubuntu (flask, libssh, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-gcp-6.17, linux-realtime, linux-realtime, linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8, snapd, and vim).

The Sashiko patch-review system

Par : corbet
17 mars 2026 à 16:32
Roman Gushchin has announced the existence of an LLM-driven patch-review system named Sashiko. It automatically creates reviews for all patches sent to the linux-kernel mailing list (and some others).

In my measurement, Sashiko was able to find 53% of bugs based on a completely unfiltered set of 1,000 recent upstream issues using "Fixes:" tags (using Gemini 3.1 Pro). Some might say that 53% is not that impressive, but 100% of these issues were missed by human reviewers.

Sashiko is built on Chris Mason's review prompts (covered here in October 2025), but the implementation has evolved considerably.

FSFE reports trouble with payment provider

Par : jzb
17 mars 2026 à 15:15

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is reporting that payment provider Nexi has terminated its contract without prior notice, which means that a number of FSFE supporters' recurring payments have been halted:

Over the past few months, our former payment provider Nexi S.p.A. ("Nexi") requested access to private data, which we understood to be specifically the usernames and passwords of our supporters. We have refused this request. All our attempts to clarify Nexi's request, or to understand how their need for such information was necessary and legal, were met with what we consider to be vague and unsatisfactory explanations relating to a general need for risk analysis.

[...] The decisions that Nexi has made are incomprehensible to us. Over the last months, as part of a security audit that Nexi claimed to be conducting, we have provided them with large amounts of the FSFE's financial documentation, which even included private information of our executive staff. We have answered all of their questions. But we have to draw a line when private companies like Nexi demand access to the sensitive and private data of our supporters.

According to the blog post, more than 450 supporters have been affected by this. The FSFE's donation pages have been updated with its new payment provider.

[$] Fedora ponders a "sandbox" technology lifecycle

Par : jzb
17 mars 2026 à 13:30

Fedora Project Leader (FPL) Jef Spaleta has issued a "modest proposal" for a technology-innovation-lifecycle process that would provide more formal structure for adopting technologies in Fedora. The idea is to spur innovation in the project without having an adverse impact on stability or the release process. Spaleta's proposal is somewhat light on details, particularly as far as specific examples of which projects would benefit; however, the reception so far is mostly positive and some think that it could make Fedora more "competitive" by being the place where open-source projects come to grow.

Security updates for Tuesday

Par : jzb
17 mars 2026 à 12:18
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (mingw-openexr, vim, and yarnpkg), Oracle (freerdp), Red Hat (389-ds-base, container-tools:rhel8, libpng, libpng15, nginx, nginx:1.24, nginx:1.26, opencryptoki, python3, python3.11, python3.12, and python3.9), SUSE (ruby4.0-rubygem-activestorage, ruby4.0-rubygem-activesupport, ruby4.0-rubygem-glogalid, ruby4.0-rubygem-grpc, ruby4.0-rubygem-jquery-rails, ruby4.0-rubygem-loofah, and rubygem4.0-rubygem-fluentd), and Ubuntu (curl, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.17, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-6.17, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.17, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-6.8, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iotg, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-5.15, linux-oracle, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gcp, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, python-cryptography, and roundcube).

Marknote 1.5 released

Par : jzb
16 mars 2026 à 18:40

Version 1.5 of Marknote, a Markdown-based note-management application, has been released. Notable features in this release include Source Mode for working directly with Markdown instead of the WYSIWYG interface, internal wiki-style links for notes, as well as simpler management of notes and notebooks.

Debian Project Leader election underway

Par : jzb
16 mars 2026 à 17:43

Kurt Roeckx has announced that Debian has moved to the campaigning period for the 2026 Debian Project Leader (DPL) election. This year there is only one candidate, Sruthi Chandran, so Debian voters will have a choice between Chandran as DPL or "None of the above". The campaign period will run through April 3, and the voting period will run from April 4 to April 17. Chandran has not yet posted a platform for the 2026 election, but her 2024 platform is available on the Debian wiki.

GIMP 3.2 released

Par : jake
16 mars 2026 à 17:04
After a year's worth of development since GIMP 3.0 was released, the team behind the open-source image editor has released GIMP 3.2. It comes as part of the plan to release GIMP more frequently, rather than wait six or seven years between releases. The release comes with lots of new features (as can be seen in more detail in the release notes), including 20 new brushes for the MyPaint Brush tool, an "overwrite" paint mode, new and upgraded file formats, UI improvements in a variety of places, such as the on-canvas text editor, and new non-destructive layers:
  • You can now use Link Layers to incorporate external image as part of your compositions, easily scaling, rotating, and transforming them without losing quality or sharpness. The link layer's content is updated when the source file is modified
  • The Path tool can now create Vector Layers, which lets you draw shapes with adjustable fill and stroke settings.
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