LWN.net

Web sites are being increasingly beset by AI scraperbots — a problem that we have written about before , and which has slowly ramped up to an occasional de-facto DDoS attack. This has not gone uncontested, however: web site operators from around the world have been working on inventive countermeasures. These solutions target the problem posed by scraperbots in different ways; iocaine , a MIT-licensed nonsense generator, is designed to make scraped text less useful by poisoning it with fake data…

Transient devices pose a special challenge for an operating-system kernel. They can disappear at any time, leaving behind kernel data structures that no longer refer to an existing device, but which may still be in use by unknown kernel code. Managing the resulting lifecycle issues has frustrated kernel developers for years. In September 2025, the revocable resource-management patch series from Tzung-Bi Shih appeared to offer a partial solution to this problem. Since then, though, other problem…

Reinhard Tartler of Debian's new DFSG, Licensing & New Packages Team , or simply "DFSG Team", has announced that the team is now operational and is deploying new tooling to improve the NEW queue experience for Debian developers and maintainers. Our primary and immediate goal is simple: get the queue down. We are currently settling in and refining our processes to ensure stability and consistency. While our focus right now is on clearing the backlog, our long-term vision is to enable all Debian …

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.12.71 stable kernel. He writes, " All users of the 6.12 kernel series that had issues with 6.12.69 or 6.12.70 should upgrade, as some regressions are fixed here. "

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (brotli, git-lfs, image-builder, kernel, keylime, libsoup3, and pcs), Fedora (chromium, gnutls, osslsigncode, and p11-kit), Mageia (golang, libpng, thunderbird, and xrdp), Red Hat (git-lfs, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, osbuild-composer, and toolbox), Slackware (gnutls and libpng), SUSE (apptainer, cockpit, cockpit-packages, cockpit-subscriptions, freerdp2, gimp, glib2, go, go1.24, go1.25, gpg2, ImageMagick, java-1_8…

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front : Git; GCC and KCFI; modernizing swapping; 6.18 statistics; modern FOSS challenges. Briefs : Kernel ML; tag2upload; LFS sysvinit; postmarketOS FOSDEM; Ardour 9.0; Offpunk 3.0; Dave Farber RIP; Quotes; ... Announcements : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Version 6.17 of the Linux manual-page collection has been released. Along with a long list of updates to the man pages themselves, it includes some new utility programs of interest. The grepc(1) program is something that originated in this project, as it helped me find code quickly in glibc and the Linux kernel. However, I've found it incredibly useful outside of this project. I'll take some space to announce it, as it's much more than just a tool for writing manual pages, and I expect it to be…

Git is ubiquitous; in the last two decades, the version-control system has truly achieved world domination. Almost every developer uses it and the vast majority of open-source projects are hosted in Git repositories. That does not mean, however, that it is perfect. Patrick Steinhardt used his main-track session at FOSDEM 2026 to discuss some of its shortcomings and how they are being addressed to prepare Git for the next decade.

The postmarketOS project has published a recap from FOSDEM 2026, including the FOSS on Mobile devroom , and a summary of its post-FOSDEM hackathon . This includes decisions on governance and the project's AI policy: AI policy : our current AI policy does not state that we forbid the use of generative AI in postmarketOS, so far this document just lists why we think it is a bad idea and misaligned with the project values. We discussed this and will soon change it (via merge request) to clearly st…

Greg Kroah-Hartman has unleashed six new stable kernels: 6.18.10 , 6.6.124 , 6.12.70 , 6.1.163 , 5.15.200 , and 5.10.250 . Each one contains important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel, linux-6.1, munge, and tcpflow), Fedora (accel-ppp, atuin, babl, bustle, endless-sky, envision, ettercap, fapolicy-analyzer, firefox, glycin, gnome-settings-daemon, go-fdo-client, greenboot-rs, greetd, helix, hwdata, keylime-agent-rust, kiwi, libdrm, maturin, mirrorlist-server, ntpd-rs, ogr2osm, open-vm-tools, perl-App-Cme, perl-Net-RDAP, perl-rdapper, polymake, python-requests-ratelimiter, python-tqdm, rust-add-determinism, rust-afterburn, ru…

From the NANOG list comes the sad news of the passing of Dave Farber. His professional accomplishments and impact are almost endless, but often captured by one moniker: "grandfather of the Internet," acknowledging the foundational contributions made by his many students at the University of California, Irvine; the University of Delaware; the University of Pennsylvania; and Carnegie Mellon University.

Matthias Clasen has published a short summary of the GTK hackfest held prior to FOSDEM 2026 . Topics include discussions on unstable APIs, a decision to bump the C runtime requirement to C11 in the next development cycle, limiting changes in GTK3 to crash and build fixes, as well as the state of accessibility: On the accessibility side, we are somewhat worried about the state of AccessKit . The code upstream is maintained, but we haven't seen movement in the GTK implementation. We still default…

Michiel Leenaars, director of strategy at the NLnet Foundation , used his keynote at FOSDEM to sound warnings for the community for free and open-source (FOSS) software; in particular, he talked about the threats posed by geopolitical politics, dangerous allies, and large language models (LLMs). His talk was a mix of observations and suggestions that pertain to FOSS in general and to Europe in particular as geopolitical tensions have mounted in recent months.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (fence-agents, firefox, fontforge, freerdp, kernel-rt, keylime, libsoup, libsoup3, nodejs22, nodejs24, opentelemetry-collector, osbuild-composer, python3.12-wheel, qemu-kvm, resource-agents, thunderbird, and util-linux), Debian (kernel, rlottie, shaarli, and usbmuxd), Fedora (asciinema, atuin, bustle, cef, envision, glycin, greetd, helix, java-21-openjdk, java-25-openjdk, java-latest-openjdk, keylime-agent-rust, maturin, mirrorlist-server, ntpd-rs,…