Version 7.3 of Texinfo, the GNU documentation-formatting system, has been released. It contains a number of new features, performance improvements, and enhancements.

The free and open-source software (FOSS) movements have always been about giving freedom and power to individuals and organizations; throughout that history, though, there have also been actors trying to exploit FOSS to their own advantage. At Configuration Management Camp (CfgMgmtCamp) 2026 in Ghent, Belgium, Richard Fontana described the "exploitation paradox" of open source: the recurring pattern of crises when actors exploit loopholes to restrict freedoms or gain the upper hand over others in the community. He also talked about the attempts to close those loopholes as well as the need to look beyond licenses as a means of keeping freedom alive.

Version 1.0 of Gram, an "opinionated fork of the Zed code editor", has been released. Gram removes telemetry, AI features, collaboration features, and more. It adds built-in documentation, support for additional languages, and tab-completion features similar to the Supertab plugin for Vim. The mission statement for the project explains:

At first, I tried to build some other efforts I found online to make Zed work without the AI features just so I could check it out, but didn't manage to get them to work. At some point, the curiosity turned into spite. I became determined to not only get the editor to run without all of the misfeatures, but to make it a full-blown fork of the project. Independent of corporate control, in the spirit of Vim and the late Bram Moolenaar who could have added subscription fees and abusive license agreements had he so wanted, but instead gave his work as a gift to the world and asked only for donations to a good cause close to his heart in return.

This is the result. Feel free to build it and see if it works for you. There is no license agreement or subscription beyond the open source license of the code (GPLv3). It is yours now, to do with as you please.

According to a blog post on the site, the plan for the editor is to diverge from Zed and proceed slowly.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (lxd, orthanc, and thunderbird), Fedora (cef, chromium, gimp, nextcloud, pgadmin4, python-django4.2, python-django5, python3-docs, python3.12, python3.13, and python3.9), Oracle (container-tools:rhel8 and mingw-fontconfig), Slackware (gvfs, mozilla, and telnet), SUSE (avahi, cockpit-356, cockpit-podman, cockpit-podman-120, containerized-data-importer, digger-cli, docker, evolution-data-server, expat, firefox, freerdp2, gimp, glib2, glibc, go1, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, gosec, gpg2, heroic-games-launcher, ImageMagick, kernel, kernel-firmware, kubevirt, libIex-3_4-33, libjxl-devel, libpng16, libsodium, libsoup, libsoup2, libssh, libudisks2-0, libwireshark19, protobuf, python-pyasn1, python-urllib3, python311, python311-Flask, rust-keylime, thunderbird, ucode-intel, and valkey), and Ubuntu (git).

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the 6.19.4 and 6.18.14 stable kernels. Shortly after 6.19.4 was released Kris Karas reported "getting a repeatable Oops right when networking is initialized, likely when nft is loading its ruleset"; the problem did not appear to be present in 6.18.14. Users of nftables may wish to hold off on upgrades to 6.19.4 for now. We will provide updates as they are available.

Update: Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.19.5 and 6.18.15 kernels with a fix for the regression in 6.19.4 and 6.18.14. All users of netfilter are advised to upgrade to those versions.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds-base, buildah, firefox, freerdp, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana-pcp, kernel, libpng15, munge, nodejs:20, nodejs:22, podman, protobuf, python-pyasn1, runc, and skopeo), Debian (chromium, nss, and python-django), Fedora (firefox, freerdp, gh, libmaxminddb, nss, python3.15, and udisks2), Oracle (buildah, firefox, freerdp, kernel, libpng, podman, python-pyasn1, skopeo, and valkey), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8), SUSE (autogen, chromium, cockpit, cockpit-machines-348, cockpit-packages, cockpit-repos, cockpit-subscriptions, crun, docker, docker-compose, docker-stable, erlang, freerdp, frr, glib2, gpg2, kernel, kernel-firmware, libsodium, libsoup, libsoup2, openvswitch, python, python-pyasn1, python-urllib3, python-urllib3_1, python3, qemu, redis7, regclient, and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-6.8, linux-xilinx, python-authlib, and ruby-rack).

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (freerdp), Debian (firefox-esr and libstb), Fedora (389-ds-base, chromium, firefox, munge, opentofu, python3-docs, python3.14, and vim), Oracle (buildah, containernetworking-plugins, gimp, grafana, grafana-pcp, kernel, podman, runc, and skopeo), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8, golang, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana, grafana-pcp, mariadb:10.11, podman, and skopeo), SUSE (cacti, docker-stable, expat, firefox-esr, freerdp, freerdp2, libjxl, libsoup-2_4-1, python-tornado, python-urllib3_1, python3, python311-Django4, python312, python313, python39, and redis), and Ubuntu (ceph, mongodb, protobuf, and rlottie).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: New flags for clone3(); Discord replacements; virtual swap spaces; BPF memory protection keys; PostgreSQL's lessons in attracting contributors; 7.0 merge window; Network Time Security.
• Briefs: OpenSUSE governance; Firefox 148.0; GNU Awk 5.4.0; GNU Octave 11.1.0; Rust in Ladybird; LibreOffice Online; Weston 15.0; RIP Robert Kaye; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The Network Time Protocol (NTP) debuted in 1985; it is a universally used, open specification that is deeply important for all sorts of activities we take for granted. It also, despite a number of efforts, remains stubbornly unsecured. Ruben Nijveld presented work at FOSDEM 2026 to speed adoption of the thus-far largely ignored standard for securing NTP traffic: IETF's RFC-8915 that specifies Network Time Security (NTS) for NTP.

The MetaBrainz Foundation has announced the unexpected passing of its founder and executive director, Robert Kaye:

Robert's vision and leadership shaped MetaBrainz and left a lasting mark on the music industry and open source movement. His contributions were significant and his loss is deeply felt across our global community.

The Board is actively overseeing a smooth leadership transition and has measures in place to ensure that MetaBrainz continues to operate without interruption. Further updates will be shared in due course.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (grafana and grafana-pcp), Debian (gnutls28), Fedora (chromium and yt-dlp), Oracle (389-ds-base, kernel, munge, and openssl), Red Hat (buildah, containernetworking-plugins, opentelemetry-collector, podman, runc, and skopeo), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (chromium, cosign, firefox, freerdp, gimp, heroic-games-launcher, kernel, libopenssl-3-devel, libxml2, libxslt, mosquitto, openqa, os-autoinst, openqa-devel-container, openvswitch, phpunit, postgresql14, postgresql15, postgresql16, protobuf, python310, python311-PyPDF2, python36, snpguest, warewulf4, and weblate), and Ubuntu (curl, kernel, linux, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-oracle, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-gcp-fips, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-6.8, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-realtime, linux-raspi-realtime, linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8, and linux-xilinx).

Version 5.4.0 of GNU awk (gawk) has been released. This is a major release with a change in gawk's default regular-expression matcher: it now uses MinRX as the default regular-expression engine.

This matcher is fully POSIX compliant, which the current GNU matchers are not. In particular it follows POSIX rules for finding the longest leftmost submatches. It is also more strict as to regular expression syntax, but primarily in a few corner cases that normal, correct, regular expression usage should not encounter.

Because regular expression matching is such a fundamental part of awk/gawk, the original GNU matchers are still included in gawk. In order to use them, give a value to the GAWK_GNU_MATCHERS environment variable before invoking gawk.

[...] The original GNU matchers will eventually be removed from gawk. So, please take the time to notice and report any issues in the MinRX matcher, so that they can be ironed out sooner rather than later.

See the release announcement for additional changes.

Version 148 of Firefox has been released. The most notable change in this release is the addition of a "Block AI enhancements" option that allows turning off "new or current AI enhancements in Firefox, or pop-ups about them" with a single toggle.

With this release, Firefox now supports the Trusted Types API to help prevent cross-site scripting attacks as well as the Sanitizer API that provides new methods for HTML manipulation. See the release notes for developers for changes that may affect web developers or those who create Firefox add-ons.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, and munge), Debian (openssl), Mageia (gegl), Oracle (firefox, freerdp, gnupg2, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana, grafana-pcp, java-11-openjdk, kernel, libpng15, munge, nodejs:20, nodejs:22, protobuf, and uek-kernel), SUSE (libpng12, libpng16, and openQA, openQA-devel-container, os-autoinst), and Ubuntu (gimp, libssh, and linux-azure).