Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (apr-util, corosync, curl, freerdp, gstreamer1-plugins-base, libarchive, libtiff, libxml2, openexr, openssh, rsyslog, sudo, tomcat, unbound, webkit2gtk3, yggdrasil, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manager), Debian (chromium), Fedora (alsa-plugins, amarok, aqualung, atomes, attract-mode, audacious-plugins, audacity, baresip, blender, calibre, cantata, cef, chromaprint, chromium, digikam, doctl, dragon, ffmpeg, ffmpegthumbnailer, ffmpegthumbs, ffms2, fooyin, glaxnimate, goldendict-ng, gpac, gstreamer1-plugin-libav, guacamole-server, guvcview, haruna, hedgewars, icecat, janus, k3b, kdenlive, kf5-kfilemetadata, kf6-kfilemetadata, kpipewire, lazygal, lego, libcamera-apps, libheif, libopenshot, libopenshot-audio, libvncserver, localsearch, mat2, minidlna, mivisionx, mixxx, mlt, monado, mpd, mpv, mpv-mpris, neatvnc, notcurses, nv-codec-headers13.0, obs-studio, obs-studio-plugin-droidcam, obs-studio-plugin-pwvideo, obs-studio-plugin-vaapi, obs-studio-plugin-vkcapture, obs-studio-plugin-webkitgtk, olive, openal-soft, OpenBoard, opencv, openmw, opustags, os-autoinst, patool, Pencil2D, perl-HTML-FormHandler, pianobar, prometheus-podman-exporter, python-audioread, python-torchaudio, python-torchvision, qmmp, qmmp-plugin-pack, qmplay2, qt5-qtwebengine, qt6-qtmultimedia, qt6-qtwebengine, qtox, retroarch, rocdecode, rocdecode7.2, rsgain, siril, squeezelite, swayimg, tigervnc, timg, unpaper, vlc, vtk, waypipe, wf-recorder, wivrn, wxsvg, xine-lib, xmms2, xpra, xscreensaver, yle-dl, znc, and znc-clientbuffer), Mageia (nmap, pcre2, and vim), Oracle (curl, openssl-fips-provider, sudo, tomcat, webkit2gtk3, yggdrasil, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manager), Slackware (util-linux), SUSE (cadvisor, chromium, coredns, fake-gcs-server, freeciv, gh, glibc, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, hugo, kbd, kbfs, keybase-client, libheif, libpcap, mbedtls, pcre2, python-asteval, python-jwcrypto, python311, python313-ansi2html, shadowsocks-rust, sofia-sip, and trivy), and Ubuntu (clamav, expat, ghostscript, glib2.0, gst-plugins-base1.0, gst-plugins-good1.0, libsoup2.4, libsoup3, libssh2, libxml2, linux-azure-6.8, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-7.0, linux-azure-fde, linux-intel-iotg, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-xilinx, linux-ibm, linux-nvidia-bos, linux-raspi, memcached, openjdk-17, openjdk-21, openjdk-25, openjdk-8, openjdk-lts, rsyslog, and strongswan).

The open-source consulting firm Igalia has put out an announcement celebrating 25 years of working on upstream FOSS projects for its clients. The list of projects the company has worked on is rather eye-opening: WebKit, mobile-browser rendering (on Maemo, Moblin, MeeGo, and Tizen), the Linux kernel (CPU and GPU scheduling), 3D graphics drivers, the Orca screen reader, GStreamer, and lots more. Beyond that, the company, which is a worker-owned cooperative, does its work in ways that benefit the community as well as its clients:

None of this is charity. Igalia is a consultancy, and most of the work above was paid for by someone with a product to ship: a device maker who needs the web to run well on their hardware, a platform that needs a feature its users keep asking for, a company whose roadmap depends on something deep in the stack working better than it does today. What they get from us is not a patch to carry forever. We do the work upstream, in the project itself, so it arrives in the next release and keeps working long after the contract ends. Our customers ship products built on code that nobody has to maintain alone, and everyone else gets the same code. That has been the arrangement from the start.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 7.2.7, 6.18.53, and 6.12.111 stable kernels. As is usual these days, they are quite large; also no surprise is that they provide many important fixes throughout the kernel tree. Users of those kernels are advised to update.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, perl-Net-DNS, sudo, tomcat, and tomcat9), Debian (chromium, gimp, libde265, libevent, linux-6.12, ruby-jwt, and unbound), Fedora (asterisk, chromium, doctl, dovecot, evolution, firefox, forgejo, freeciv, freeipa, gegl04, gimp, libheif, nss, opkssh, parted, ruby, stb, thunderbird, unbound, and webkitgtk), Mageia (bind, gawk, gdk-pixbuf2.0, graphicsmagick, gstreamer1.0-plugins-base, libde265, libpcap, libssh, mpg123, ntfs-3g, ntpsec, patch, perl-YAML, postfix, python-configargparse, and python-httplib2), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, firefox, image-builder, kernel, libevent, libsoup, libsoup3, perl-Net-DNS, python-lxml, sudo, tomcat, tomcat9, and unbound), Slackware (stunnel), SUSE (alloy, dovecot22, ffmpeg-8, firefox, firefox-esr, freeipmi, glibc, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, helm, ImageMagick, jq, kbd, kernel-devel, libpcap, libsoup, libzypp, zypper, NetworkManager-applet-l2tp, nginx, openCryptoki, pcre2, python311, python313-aiosmtplib, python313-litellm, rpm, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (linux-aws, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-azure-fips, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp-fips, linux-azure-fips, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-realtime, and rclone).

Linus Torvalds has released the 7.3-rc4 kernel prepatch. It is, unsurprisingly at this point, large: "We all know the drill by now: 'it's big, yadda yadda'".

At the 2026 edition of FOSSY, Romeo Solano gave a fast-paced, humorous presentation on what could have been a rather boring topic: server encryption. There are a number of threats that we face in today's world, from criminals, government overreach, espionage, and more, that can be thwarted with encryption. But encrypting data on a system that may live elsewhere, without any access to its keyboard at boot time, is rather more difficult than encrypting the disk of a laptop. Solano described the problems and gave a tour of some of the solutions in the talk.

Typst is a system for typesetting documents into various formats: PDF, SVG, PNG, and, in progress, HTML. It is adept at handling technical material, and is often considered to be an eventual LaTeX replacement. We last looked in on Typst a year ago, when it had reached version 0.13. A new version, 0.15, was released in June with lots of new features, including support for variable fonts, MathML, multiple bibliographies, and more. Typst is free, Apache-2.0-licensed software, programmed in Rust.

Python's support for multithreaded programs has improved considerably over the last few years with the advent of the "free-threaded" version of the language. But testing multithreaded programs is notoriously difficult, because the underlying host system determines the thread-execution ordering, which adds an element of non-determinism. At PyCon US, Larry Hastings gave a talk (YouTube video) about his blanket project, which is meant to provide mechanisms for deterministic testing of multithreaded Python code.

At FOSSY 2026, several people from the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), which organizes the conference, gave a presentation about an ongoing violation of the Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3). Bradley Kühn, Karen Sandler, and Denver Gingerich spoke about different aspects of the violation, which is in regard to 3D-printer software from Bambu Lab, and what is being done to try to provide users with alternatives. One aspect that is particularly interesting is that the circumvention that the company is employing is precisely what the AGPL was written to prevent.

At the outset of his PyCon US 2026 talk, Trey Hunner said that his goal was for attendees to stop representing filesystem paths as strings and to use pathlib instead. That's kind of a tall order, at least for longtime Python users, since string-based paths have been pervasive—and mostly work. It is that "mostly" part that makes Hunner want to see things change, of course, so he set out to describe a lesser-known corner of the language and to try to change some minds.