John MacFarlane has published a lengthy retrospective to commemorate twenty years of the Pandoc document converter.

On August 3, 2006, I uploaded the first version of pandoc to my website, releasing it under the free GPL license. Pandoc 0.1 consisted of about 3000 lines of Haskell code, with no dependencies aside from GHC's standard library. It could convert Markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX documents into any of these formats, plus RTF or S5. I had no idea at the time that this would just be the first of over two hundred releases over the next twenty years; that the project would become the most popular program written in Haskell; that I would spend countless hours on bug-fixes, improvement, and project management; that I would collaborate with programmers in many other countries; that pandoc would come to support over fifty document formats; that it would allow automatic generation of citations and bibliographies; that it would become integrated into academic writing tools like Quarto and Jupyter Notebook; that it would be installed on millions of computers around the world.

How did this happen? I want to take advantage of pandoc's birthday to tell the story of the project, as best I can remember it.

For those of us with a long memory: John Goerzen has announced the release of C-Kermit 11, the first release of this file-transfer utility in 15 years.

As Debian maintainer of Kermit, I noticed some areas where it wasn't matching modern expectations. One area was, not surprising for a project of its age, security. Another area was that its character set or line-ending conversions are usually not desired now; we are used to byte-identical binary transfers, and the defaults caused confusion and even some rare instances of data corruption. So I started making a few patches last year.

See the changelog for details on the work that has been done.

Most of us probably haven't thought about C-Kermit in years (if ever), but there was a time when it was an essential tool for moving files between machines.

The Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) subsystem provides a way to service filesystem requests from a user-space server, which moves the format-handling code out of the kernel. The FUSE server can use the io_uring facility for better performance, but Bernd Schubert is concerned that memory is being wasted because the current implementation has a single, large buffer size that is excessive for small I/O operations. He led a discussion on that topic in the filesystem track of the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit in Zagreb, Croatia.

The JFrog blog examines some reported vulnerabilities in SQLite, some of which made their way into high-profile vulnerability databases, that turned out to be entirely fabricated by LLMs.

These LLM slop CVEs can cause organizations to waste time investigating and patching vulnerabilities that do not actually exist, as well as polluting vulnerability databases. In environments where Critical vulnerabilities are automatically prioritized or tickets are opened based on vulnerability scores, such fabricated CVEs can turn into a real burden.

In environments where AI is used to automate vulnerability triage and remediation this becomes even more concerning. An AI agent that encounters a fabricated CVE may attempt to locate the vulnerable function, generate a patch, or recommend changes based on code that does not even exist. Instead of helping security teams remediate real vulnerabilities, it can lead them down a completely wrong path, potentially introducing unnecessary changes and wasting time.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.6, 6.18.42, 6.12.101, and 6.6.148 stable kernels. Each contains hundreds of patches—the 7.1.6 kernel has more than 700—with fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.

The release of NetBSD 11.0, the 19th major version of the operating system, has been announced. There are many changes and enhancements since the 10.1 release, including a new port to RISC-V, better support for Linux system calls in compat_linux(), as well as improvements to the NPF firewall.

As you are probably aware, the number of security issues found or suspected everywhere has massively increased with the advent of AI tools. As a consequence, we can't publish a release without open issues. Instead of delaying the release further to fix them (new ones are being reported all the time), we've instead chosen to be transparent about this.

See the full release notes for links to the binary distributions and links to the full change logs.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, fence-agents, kernel, kernel-rt, openssh, osbuild-composer, perl-Archive-Tar, perl-DBI, perl:5.32, pipewire, python-pillow, qemu-kvm, unbound, and vim), Debian (chromium, incus, kernel, kissfft, libgd2, libmodbus, libssh, node-tar, php8.4, poppler, python-authlib, sslh, and starlette), Fedora (borgbackup, coturn, curl, exim, fuse-overlayfs, gh, GitPython, goaccess, lemonldap-ng, libgit2, nextcloud, nsd, php, postgresql16, python3.12, rabbitmq-server, rust-libgit2-sys, and xen), Mageia (bluez, firmware, kernel, kmod, wireless-regdb), Oracle (buildah, compat-libtiff3, dovecot, fence-agents, firefox, gimp, glibc, grafana, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, java-25-openjdk, kernel, libgcrypt, libtiff, libXfont2, nodejs24, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, openssh, openssl, PackageKit, pipewire, python-pillow, rest, sssd, vim, and yelp), SUSE (bind, chromium, dnsdist, gdk-pixbuf-loader-libheif, gio-branding-upstream, google-guest-agent, govulncheck-vulndb, GraphicsMagick, ignition, ImageMagick, keybase-client, kronosnet, libblkid-devel, libntpc1, libpng16, nano, openssh, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-3, openvpn, PackageKit, perl-mojolicious, php8, python-nltk, python313-asteval, python313-certifi, python313-GitPython, python313-huggingface-hub, rsyslog, tomcat, tomcat10, tomcat11, traefik2, valkey, warewulf4, webkit2gtk3, and yq), and Ubuntu (linux-intel-iotg).

The 7.2-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Quoth Linus: "Hmm. This rc is huge. Even by the "new normal" standards this is a big rc, and I think it's the biggest rc6 we've had in years at least by commit count." There were 537 non-merge commits applied between 7.2-rc5 and 7.2-rc6.