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Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.19.8 , 6.18.18 , and 6.12.77 stable kernels. Each of these kernels includes a number of important fixes; users are advised to upgrade.

Reddit user "Ok_Lingonberry3296" has posted the results of an extensive investigation into the companies that are pushing US state legislatures to enact age-verification bills. I've been pulling public records on the wave of "age verification" bills moving through US state legislatures. IRS 990 filings, Senate lobbying disclosures, state ethics databases, campaign finance records, corporate registries, WHOIS lookups, Wayback Machine archives. What started as curiosity about who was pushing thes…

Qualys has sent out a somewhat breathless advisory describing a number of vulnerabilities in the AppArmor security module, which is used in a number of Debian-based distributions (among others). This "CrackArmor" advisory exposes a confused-deputy flaw allowing unprivileged users to manipulate security profiles via pseudo-files, bypass user-namespace restrictions, and execute arbitrary code within the kernel. These flaws facilitate local privilege escalation to root through complex interactions…

In 2019, researchers published a way to identify which file-backed pages were being accessed on a system using timing information from the page cache, leading to a handful of unpleasant consequences and a change to the design of the mincore() system call. Discussion at the time led to a number of ad-hoc patches to address the problem. The lack of new page-cache attacks suggested that attempts to fix things in a piecemeal fashion had succeeded. Now, however, Sudheendra Raghav Neela, Jonas Juffin…

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, kernel, and multipart), Fedora (dnf5, dr_libs, easyrpg-player, libmaxminddb, python3.12, strongswan, task, and udisks2), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, gnutls, ImageMagick, kernel, libvpx, mingw-libpng, nginx:1.26, python3.11, and uek-kernel), Red Hat (delve, git-lfs, mingw-libpng, osbuild-composer, and rhc-worker-playbook), SUSE (cjson, curl, dnsdist, libsoup2, postgresql16, postgresql17, postgresql18, python-lxml_html_clean, pytho…

One of the first changes merged for the upcoming 7.0 release was nullfs , an empty filesystem that cannot actually contain any files. One might logically wonder why the kernel would need such a thing. It turns out, though, that there are places where a null filesystem can come in handy. For 7.0, nullfs will be used to make life a bit easier for init programs; future releases will likely use nullfs to increase the isolation of kernel threads from the init process.

Sasha Levin has announced the release of the 6.19.7 and 6.18.17 stable kernels. As usual, each contains important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gimp, git-lfs, grafana-pcp, kernel, mysql8.4, nfs-utils, opentelemetry-collector, osbuild-composer, postgresql:16, and python3.12), Debian (imagemagick and netty), Fedora (dr_libs and python-lxml-html-clean), Slackware (libarchive and libxml2), SUSE (busybox, coredns, firefox, freerdp, ghostty, gnutls, go1.25, go1.26, GraphicsMagick, grype, helm, helm3, ImageMagick, perl-Compress-Raw-Zlib, python, python311-lxml_html_clean, python311-PyPDF2, tomca…

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front : Chardet; Linux and age verification; Debian AI; Python lazy imports; Python type-system PEP; PQC HTTPS certificates; MGLRU; Fedora strategy. Briefs : LLM vulnerability; NTP security; OpenWrt 25.12.0; SUSE sale; Buildroot 2026.02; digiKam 9.0.0; Rust 1.94.0; Quotes; ... Announcements : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

A recently enacted law in California imposes an age-verification requirement on operating-system providers beginning next year. The language of the Digital Age Assurance Act does not restrict its requirements to proprietary or commercial operating systems; projects like Debian, FreeBSD, Fedora, and others seem to be on the hook just as much as Apple or Microsoft. There is some hope that the law will be amended, but there is no guarantee that it will be. This means that the developer communities…

Igalia has announced the Moonforge Linux distribution, based on OpenEmbedded and Yocto . Moonforge is an operating system framework for Linux devices that simplifies the process of building and maintaining custom operating systems. It provides a curated collection of Yocto layers and configuration files that help developers generate immutable, maintainable, and easily updatable operating system images. The goal is to offer the best possible developer experience for teams building embedded Linux…

There has been ongoing discussion in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) about how to protect internet traffic against future quantum computers. So far, that work has focused on key exchange as the most urgent problem; now, a new IETF working group is looking at adopting post-quantum cryptography for authentication and certificate transparency as well. The main challenge to doing so is the increased size of certificates — around 40 times larger. The techniques that the working group is i…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, libvpx, nfs-utils, nginx:1.26, osbuild-composer, postgresql, postgresql:12, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, postgresql:16, and python-pyasn1), Debian (imagemagick), Fedora (perl-Crypt-SysRandom-XS and systemd), Mageia (yt-dlp), Oracle (delve, gimp, git-lfs, go-rpm-macros, image-builder, kernel, libpng, libvpx, mysql8.4, nfs-utils, osbuild-composer, postgresql16, postgresql:12, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, postgresql:16, python-py…

The advent of lazy imports in the Python language is upon us, now that PEP 810 ("Explicit lazy imports") was accepted by the steering council and the feature will appear in the upcoming Python 3.15 release in October. There are a number of good reasons, performance foremost, for wanting to defer spending—perhaps wasting—the time to do an import before a needed symbol is used. However, there are also good reasons not to want that behavior, at least in some cases. The tension between those two po…

Reuters is reporting that private-equity firm EQT may be looking to sell SUSE: EQT has hired investment bank Arma Partners to sound out a group of private equity investors for a possible sale of the company, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential matters. The ​deliberations are at an early stage and there is no certainty that EQT will ​proceed with a transaction, the sources said. SUSE has traded hands a number of times over the years. Most recently it was acquired by…