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Wednesday, February 27th, 2019

    Time Event
    4:03p
    Security updates for Wednesday
    Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (elasticsearch and logstash), CentOS (java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, and polkit), Debian (chromium, exiv2, and phpmyadmin), Fedora (java-1.8.0-openjdk-aarch32 and mgetty), openSUSE (docker-runc, gvfs, qemu, systemd, and thunderbird), Oracle (java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, and polkit), Red Hat (polkit), Scientific Linux (java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, and polkit), Slackware (openssl), SUSE (amavisd-new, apache2, ceph, containerd, docker, docker-runc, golang-github-docker-libnetwork, runc, openssh, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (firefox and thunderbird).
    4:13p
    Stable kernel updates
    Stable kernels 4.20.13, 4.19.26, 4.14.104, and 4.9.161 have been released. They all contain
    important fixes and users should upgrade.
    5:02p
    [$] Revisiting PEP 394

    With the uptake of Python 3 (and the imminent end of life for Python 2.7), there is a question of which version of Python a user should get when they type "python" at the command line or have it as part of a shebang ("#!") line in a script. Back in 2011, PEP 394 ("The 'python' Command on Unix-Like Systems") was created as an informational PEP that relayed the recommendations of the Python core developers to Linux distributions and others in a similar position about which version to point python to. Now, Petr Viktorin, one of the authors of the PEP, would like to revisit those recommendations, which is something that is suggested in the PEP itself.

    9:11p
    [$] GMP and assert()

    A report of a potential security problem in the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic (GMP) library was met with a mixed reaction, from skepticism to responses verging on hostility, but the report ultimately raised a question worth pondering. What role should assertions (i.e. calls to the POSIX assert() macro) play in error handling? An assertion that fails leads to a process exit, which may not be what a developer calling into a library expects. Unexpected behavior is, of course, one step on a path that can lead to security holes.

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