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Vue lecture

F-Droid 2.0: A new chapter for Android freedom

✇LWN
Par : jzb

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.

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Research into file-notification attacks on Linux

✇LWN
Par : jzb

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.

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[$] Listening to the radio with Rust

✇LWN
Par : daroc

Many of the transmissions sent over the radio spectrum can be decoded with a relatively cheap hardware dongle. Thomas Eckert presented at RustConf 2026 in Montreal about his hobby: decoding radio transmissions with Rust. In his presentation, he covered all of the math necessary to get started with software-defined radio, and gave demonstrations of listening to AM and FM radio, as well as decoding transmissions from aircraft transponders. His slides and example code are available on GitHub.

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The Kernel Report 2026 edition

✇LWN
Par : jzb

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.

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Security updates for Thursday

✇LWN
Par : jzb
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, containernetworking-plugins, firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, openexr, perl-DBI, podman, postgresql, postgresql16, postgresql:15, runc, skopeo, and tar), Debian (libdatetime-timezone-perl, tzdata, xdg-dbus-proxy, and znc), Fedora (chromium, evolution, evolution-data-server, evolution-ews, kernel, libheif, mingw-pcre2, nginx-mod-modsecurity, unbound, and webkitgtk), Mageia (borgbackup, coreutils, firefox, nss, kbd, libnfs, libwebsockets, perl-URI, pipewire, and xdg-dbus-proxy), Oracle (apr-util, containernetworking-plugins, coreutils, curl, firefox, freerdp, gstreamer1-plugins-base, host-metering, libarchive, libtiff, libxml2, openexr, openssh, perl-DBI, podman, postgresql16, postgresql18-postgis, postgresql:15, rsyslog, runc, tar, and unbound), SUSE (apptainer, gimp, librepods, libX11-6, perl-Authen-SASL, podofo, python-WebOb, and python313-graphifyy), and Ubuntu (imagemagick, libgit2, moodle, network-manager, Open-iSNS, python-urllib3, sqlparse, and xdg-desktop-portal).
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[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 24, 2026

✇LWN
Par : corbet
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

  • Front: Git 2.56; gccrs; NetBSD and compat_linux; io_uring; Desktop UX.
  • Briefs: WordPress vulnerability; Radicle vulnerability; Systemtap 5.6; GNOME 51; Systemd v262; Quotes; ...
  • Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
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