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Thursday, October 1st, 2020
| Time |
Event |
| 12:34a |
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 1, 2020
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 1, 2020 is available. | | 12:53p |
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ruby-json-jwt and ruby-rack-cors), Fedora (xen), SUSE (aspell and tar), and Ubuntu (ruby-gon, ruby-kramdown, and ruby-rack). | | 3:40p |
[$] From O_MAYEXEC to trusted_for()
The ability to execute the contents of a file is controlled by the
execute-permission bits — some of the time. If a given file contains code
that can be executed by an interpreter — such as shell commands or code in a
language like Perl or Python, for example — there are easy ways to run the interpreter on
the file regardless of whether it has execute permission enabled or not.
Mickaël Salaün has been working on tightening up the administrator's
control over execution by interpreters for some time, but has struggled to
find an acceptable home for this feature. His latest attempt takes the
form of a new system call named trusted_for(). | | 5:04p |
A new crop of stable kernels The 5.8.13, 5.4.69, 4.19.149, 4.14.200, and 4.4.238 stable kernels have been released. Note that 4.9.238 was in the review cycle with the rest of these kernels but needed a respindue to some test failures, so it will be released on or after October 3. As usual, all five of the released kernels have fixes throughout the tree; users should upgrade. | | 5:45p |
Edmundson: Plasma and the systemd startup On his blog, David Edmundson writes about a new optional mechanism for starting up the KDE Plasma desktop using systemd. " Another big motivating factor was the ability for customisation. The root of Plasma's startup is very hardcoded. What if you want to run krunner with a different environment variable set? or have a script run every time plasmashell restarts, or show a UI after kwin is loaded but before plasma shell to perform some user setup? You can edit the code, but that's not easy and you're very much on your own.
Systemd provides that level of customisation; both at a distro or a user level out of the box. From our POV for free." | | 11:10p |
Conservancy Announces New Strategy for GPL Enforcement and Related Work, Receives Grant from ARDC The Software Freedom Conservancy has announced that it is embarking on " a new strategy toward improving compliance and the freedom of users of devices that contain Linux-based systems". That includes GPL enforcement, an effort to create alternative firmware for embedded Linux devices, and collaboration with other organizations " to promote copyleft compliance as a feature for consumers to protect their privacy and get more out of their devices". The work is being sponsored by an initial $150,000 grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC). " We take this holistic approach because compliance is not an end in itself, but rather a lever to help people advance technology for themselves and the world. Bradley Kuhn, Conservancy’s Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence remarked: 'GPL enforcement began as merely an education process more than twenty years ago. We all had hoped that industry-wide awareness of copyleft’s essential role in spreading software freedom would yield widespread, spontaneous compliance. We were simply wrong about that. Today, we observe almost universal failure in compliance throughout the (so-called) Internet of Things (IoT) market. Only unrelenting enforcement that holds companies accountable can change this abysmal reality. ARDC, a visionary grant-maker, recognizes the value of systemic enforcement that utilizes the legal system to regain software freedom. That process also catalyzes community-led projects to build liberated firmware for many devices.'" |
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