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.