The shadow-utils project provides the tools that handle /etc/shadow, /etc/passwd, and other related databases; in general, it manages users and groups on many Linux systems. While most software releases are notable for what is added, the recent shadow-utils 4.20.0 release is most noteworthy for what has been removed. Specifically, several utilities and functionality related to periodic password expiry, which were deprecated in the December 2025 4.19.0 release, have been removed as planned. It is still possible to manage some aspects of password aging with shadow-utils, but organizations that depend on such features should start planning for their complete removal within a few years.

Our current research focuses are:

• Software supply chain security — We're working on an observatory that allows users to identify and monitor the world's critical Open Source packages in real time, including previously hidden parts of the dependency graph.
• Maintainer burnout — Our report on burnout in Open Source has been well-received. We're working on yearly follow-ups, plus a companion report on how AI is affecting maintainer burnout.

Moving forward, the Lab's experts will direct funding to and supervise Open Source sustainability researchers doing critical work. We are already working with universities to teach the next generations of software supply chain experts.

Version 1.33.0 of the LightDM display manager has been released. This is the first release in four years: the project had been sponsored by Canonical but was effectively unmaintained in recent years. It has been transferred to a new community repository and is now maintained by Joshua Peisach and Neal Gompa.

The new release includes Qt6 support, code optimizations, and a list of other fixes that had been in limbo pending a new release.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.12.102, 6.6.150, 6.1.182, 5.15.215, 5.10.264 stable kernels. This round of stable kernel releases contains a fix for a single bug, found by Thomas Lamprecht, that affected several of the kernels released yesterday in response to a security vulnerability (CVE-2026-68480) that could allow data leakage through speculative execution.

The 6.12.102 release adds the backported security fix for CVE-2026-68480 to the 6.12 series. As always, users are advised to upgrade.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.7, 6.18.43, 6.6.149, 6.1.181, 5.15.214, and 5.10.263 stable kernels. These kernels fix a single security vulnerability (CVE-2026-68480) that could allow data leakage through speculative execution. Users of those kernels are advised to upgrade.

Version 0.10 of the uutils project's Rust Coreutils has been released. This release focused on compatibility with the GNU Core Utilities suite, with Rust Coreutils now passing 645 of 690 tests, up from 625 with version 0.9.0. Notable changes in this release include addition of the mv --exchange option, an OpenSSL backend for checksum utilities, applying SELinux labels at creation when using mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod, as well as a number of performance and security improvements.

The project has an online playground that runs the Rust Coreutils directly in the browser via WebAssembly for those who would like to try the utilities without installing them. LWN covered the uutils project in February 2025.

• Front: Process-builder API; Fedora COI; FUSE io_uring buffer sizes; BPF network namespaces; FUSE plans; BPF libraries; directory creation system call.
• Briefs: AISI hack; JFrog on CVEs; npm worm; AUR adoption; NetBSD 11.0; b4 0.16.0; C-Kermit 11; Rust LLM policy; Servo 0.4.0; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The new "b4 bugs" command integrates with git-bug to let you track bug reports alongside your git repository. Bugs are stored as git objects inside the repo, so they travel with the code and can be shared via git push/pull without any external service.

There are also a lot of improvements to b4 review (which was covered here in March), better conflict resolution in b4 shazam, improved history rewriting, and more.

Jordan Rife's work involves writing BPF programs for Cilium that interface with Kubernetes networking. As part of that work, he wants to enable BPF programs with appropriate permissions to iterate through the sockets of a different network namespace. He led a session about the idea at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit where the BPF developers in attendance were quick to suggest a number of related alternatives.

No one except the author is required to read LLM output unless they choose to: LLM output isn't allowed in public docs, PR descriptions, or Github comments unless it's clearly marked; reviewers aren't required to look at LLM PRs if they don't want to.

No one is required to use LLMs to contribute to rust-lang/rust: policies must be written first for humans, and only summarized for machines; LLM reviews cannot substitute for human review or self-review.

You are allowed to generate LLM content that only you see, without disclosure, as long as you do not post it anywhere that you expect us to read or review.

The agent opened a malicious pull request (PR) to ⟨REPO_A⟩ and pursued a number of strategies to get it merged:

1. Repeatedly commented on the PR with sockpuppet accounts to manufacture consensus and pressure the maintainer into approving with minimal review.
2. Opened a GitHub Issue in another repository (also owned by ⟨PERSON_A⟩) containing a prompt injection for other coding agents. The malicious instructions were addressed to issue-triage AI coding agents and invisible to humans viewing the website.
3. Sent multiple emails to ⟨PERSON_A⟩ and ⟨PERSON_B⟩, with different pretexts to get them to run malicious code. Over the course of the sample, the agent sent five emails, some containing malware, others aimed at persuading a maintainer to accept the pull request.

It would be surprising if this were the only incident of this type; the only real difference here is that the people involved are documenting what happened.

The Fedora Council is considering a conflict-of-interest (COI) policy for its decision-making bodies, such as the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), special-interest groups (SIGs), and any other groups or individuals that report to the council and are responsible for decisions that impact the Fedora project. The current draft does not, however, apply to the council itself. The public discussion for the COI policy began on July 23 and seems to be nearing completion, with the council set to discuss the topic again during its meeting on August 13.

StepSecurity is reporting the emergence of a new worm affecting npm packages. The design of the worm is nothing new, but the rapidity with which it is exploiting captured npm packager credentials is noteworthy.

TL;DR: A self-propagating worm, which we are calling ChainDrop, is spreading rapidly through the npm ecosystem. So far 435 packages and more than 1,550 compromised versions have been flagged, starting with keyv@6.0.0. If you are using any of the packages listed below, assume your environment is compromised. We are still investigating the full scope; check back on this post for updates.