The Sovereign Tech Agency (STA) is investing nearly €1.3 million in KDE through 2027. At Akademy 2026 in Graz, Austria, Nate Graham and Kevin Ottens, two of the contributors who helped bring in the investment, explained how the funding was secured, provided tips on how projects should approach organizations like STA, and talked about how that money will be improving KDE for everyone. In addition to keeping the community informed about the work, the pair hoped to pass on what they have learned to encourage others to help raise funds for development as well.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.8 and 6.18.54 stable kernels. Each contains a number of important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.

The F-Droid project has announced the release of F-Droid 2.0, which is a complete redesign of the official app. Notable changes in the release include making it easier to discover and install applications, more useful app categories, improved search, and much more.

For more than a decade, F-Droid has helped people discover and install free and open source Android apps. F-Droid 2.0 builds on that foundation with a modern interface, better app discovery, improved search, and a simpler experience that works well, whether you're new to F-Droid or have been using it for years.

This isn't just a visual refresh. The user experience was redesigned to integrate smoothly with current Android patterns, like Material Design, while keeping familiar F-Droid interactions in place. Key components were reworked and rewritten using Kotlin Compose, the standard toolkit these days, creating a foundation that will help us deliver improvements more quickly in the years ahead.

Sudheendra Raghav Neela, a member of a group of researchers from Graz University of Technology, has announced the release of research into file-notification attacks that would allow spying on user activity on Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows. The group has published a paper with details on the research as well as a web site with demonstrations of the vulnerabilities.

On Linux, an attacker can use inotifywatch to monitor a directory to conduct an inter-keystroke timing attack—even if they do not have read access to the files within a directory. The group also discovered a method to conduct a UI-redress attack (or "clickjacking" attack) on KDE 5 and KDE 6 by monitoring /usr/bin/pkexec to detect when Polkit spawns an authentication prompt. An attacker could draw a fake password window on top of the real window to collect a user's credentials.

Both of these flaws are still present today, though the Linux kernel did partially mitigate the issue with a fix that was included in the 5.10.248, 5.15.198, 6.1.160, 6.6.120, 6.12.65, and 6.18.3 kernels shipped in January. See the web site for more information and a mitigation to prevent password-prompt windows from losing focus.

After a two-year hiatus, LWN's Jonathan Corbet presented an updated edition of his Kernel Report at the Kernel Recipes conference. Corbet looked at what is happening in the kernel community, how it's dealing with a period of accelerated change, and where things might go in the future. Video of the talk is available on YouTube for those who'd like to tune in.

Scott Jenson has been working on user interfaces (UIs) and user experience (UX) for many years at Apple, Google, and other companies. Now, he's trying to convince open-source projects to experiment more and drive the desktop beyond the age-old "windows, icons, menus, pointer" (WIMP) model. At Akademy 2026, KDE's annual developer conference, he shared his complaints and ideas in a talk aimed at convincing those in attendance to take the lead on desktop design.

Systemd v262 has been released. Some of the notable new features include the ability to build systemd as a single statically linked binary for small containers, support for the kernel coredump socket protocol introduced with Linux 6.17, addition of OpenSSL 4 support, and many other changes. See the release notes for a full list of changes.

The Radicle peer-to-peer code-collaboration project has disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in the network protocol used by Radicle nodes. The first flaw is that the network protocol used by Radicle "does not give the confidentiality it was expected to give", which allows anyone who can observe the network between two nodes to read the data exchanged. The second is that peer authentication is broken and allows impersonation, so an attacker can spoof their Node ID and read private repositories they should not be able to read.

In practice, the two flaws are most useful when they can be exploited together: an attacker on the path sees the Node IDs at both ends of a connection, and both are normally on the allow-list. That attacker can read whatever is exchanged while they watch, and can then use a Node ID they saw to fetch the whole repository on demand. The realistic threat is anyone on the path between your node and node it syncs with, and no setting or allow-list protects against them.

We are publishing this before the security update is available. You can act on it today, and no fix we release later can undo an exposure that has already happened.

See the post for workarounds that can be used today; a major update that will be backward-incompatible is underway.

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in WordPress's get_page_template() function for page-template resolution that could allow remote-code execution (RCE) by an unauthenticated attacker, in some limited circumstances. The project has provided an update for the most recent branch of WordPress, as well as backports of the fix for branches back to 4.7. See the vulnerability report for the conditions required for an RCE attack to be successful.

The vulnerability also affects the ClassicPress fork of WordPress, though a security update has not been provided for that project yet. LWN covered ClassicPress in 2024. Users of either content-management system should update soon.

NetBSD has long had support for running Linux binaries via its kernel-level compat_linux feature, but test coverage for it was less complete than some might hope. In order to provide better testing for compat_linux, Google Summer of Code (GSoC) participant Henrique Brito opted to work on enabling the Linux Test Project (LTP) test suite to compile and run on NetBSD. At EuroBSDCon 2026, Brito's mentor, Stephen Borrill, provided a report on the project, and the status of LTP on NetBSD. The work has already resulted in some minor fixes, and a good list of additional problems to solve.

• Front: Server-data encryption; PostgreSQL scary patches; Faster kernel builds; BPF for blk-iocost; Lessons learned as DPL.
• Briefs: Brief news items from throughout the community.
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

PostgreSQL contributor Tomas Vondra has published a blog post looking at development activity in the project, with data from the late 1990s to today.

We're doing ~50 commits per week, give or take. In ~2010 we were doing maybe 25/week, and the trend seems to be a slow and consistent growth. The monthly average makes the trend a bit easier to spot. Which is good, although there's a lot of other important details (size of commits, are they new features or fixes, ...).

It however nicely aligns with the number of active committers, which also grew ~2x between 2010 and today. So maybe that's working as expected.

Pádraig Brady has announced GNU Core Utilities (coreutils) version 9.12. "There have been 288 commits by 16 people in the 21 weeks since 9.11". New features include an -A option for uname which labels all output, as well as adding awareness of the failfs and nullfs filesystem types to stat and tail.

There are many bug fixes in this release as well, including one for a bug "present in 'the beginning'" that caused some utilities to fail when traversing hierarchies if files are being removed in parallel.

What is it like to be a Debian Project Leader (DPL), or a former one? According to Andreas Tille, who stepped down this year after two consecutive terms as DPL, you'd have to be one to know. At the recent MiniDebConf in Winterthur, Switzerland, Tille spoke about what he learned while serving as DPL, some of the initiatives he led, mistakes that he made, and his thoughts on the general resolution (GR) on large language model (LLM) usage in Debian.

Sean Whitton has announced that the original fix for an arbitrary code execution flaw in Emacs (CVE-2024-53920) was incomplete. Bas Alberts discovered that viewing or editing untrusted files in modes other than Emacs's Lisp mode can also result in arbitrary code execution.

This problem affects all Emacs versions affected by CVE-2024-53920. This means Emacs 24 and newer, and possibly also older versions.

A minimal fix, attached, is queued up for release with Emacs 31.2. We (the Emacs upstream maintainers) don't expect to backport the fix to older Emacs releases ourselves.

LWN covered the original vulnerability in December 2024.