All posts by jzb

Gentoo Linux becomes an SPI Associated Project

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/969373/

The Gentoo Linux project has announced
that it is now an Associated Project of Software in the Public Interest
(SPI), which will allow it to accept tax deductible donations in the
US and reduce its “non-technical workload“:

The current Gentoo Foundation has bylaws restricting its behavior
to that of a non-profit, is a recognized non-profit only in New
Mexico, but a for-profit entity at the US federal level. A direct
conversion to a federally recognized non-profit would be unlikely to
succeed without significant effort and cost.

[…] SPI is already now recognized at US federal level as a
full-[fledged] non-profit 501(c)(3). It also handles several projects of
similar type and size (e.g., Arch and Debian) and as such has exactly
the experience and background that Gentoo needs.

According to the announcement, the goal is to “eventually
transfer the existing assets to SPI and dissolve the Gentoo
Foundation
“. How to do that is still under discussion. This will
not affect Förderverein
Gentoo e.V.
, which has public-benefit status in Germany and can
accept tax deductible donations in Europe.

Security updates for Wednesday

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/969314/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (gtkwave), Fedora (dotnet7.0, dotnet8.0, and python-pillow), Mageia (apache, gstreamer1.0, libreoffice, perl-Data-UUID, and xen), Oracle (kernel, kernel-container, and varnish), Red Hat (edk2, kernel, rear, and unbound), SUSE (apache2-mod_jk, gnutls, less, and xfig), and Ubuntu (bind9, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4,
linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.4,
linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4,
linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.5, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.5,
linux-hwe-6.5, linux-laptop, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.5,
linux-oem-6.5, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.5, linux-starfive,
linux-starfive-6.5, linux, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde,
linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gkeop,
linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15,
linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency,
linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15,
linux-raspi, linux-azure, and xorg-server, xwayland).

GNU Stow 2.4.0 released

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/969003/

Version 2.4.0 of the GNU Stow symbolic-link manager has been released.
This marks the first release for
GNU Stow since 2019. Maintainer
Adam Spires wrote:

I would like to sincerely apologise to all Stow users for this
incredibly overdue release, the cadence of which is perhaps vaguely
reminiscent of releases by the great Donald Knuth, except with none of
the grace and deliberate planning.

Spires notes that this release “makes considerable efforts to make the
internals more understandable and easy to maintain
“, and has put out a
call
for a co-maintainer.

Security updates for Monday

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/968999/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (jetty9, libcaca, libgd2, tomcat9, and util-linux), Fedora (chromium, micropython, and upx), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, dav1d, libreswan, libvirt, nodejs, texlive-20220321, and util-linux), Red Hat (less, nodejs:20, and varnish), Slackware (tigervnc), and SUSE (buildah, c-ares, cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, cont, curl, expat, go1.21, go1.22, guava, helm, indent, krb5, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-exportproxy-container, virt-exportserver-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-t, libcares2, libvirt, ncurses, nghttp2, podman, postfix, python-Django, python-Pillow, python310, qemu, rubygem-rack, thunderbird, ucode-intel, and xen).

Tridge returns to rsync

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/968732/

Wayne Davison has announced
the release of rsync version 3.3.0, which
contains a number of bug fixes and minor enhancements. Davison has
also announced a change in maintainers and a move to a new GitHub
project:

The github repos have moved to a new RsyncProject organization. Because
various life events have been monopolizing my time, I reached out to
Tridge [Andrew Tridgell] (the original author) and he has graciously agreed to get back into rsync
work, along with Paul Mackerras, who was also an early contributor to
rsync. This new team will be working mainly on maintenance tasks, and not
so much on new features. If you want to get involved, feel free to reach
out on the new discord RsyncProject channels.

The new GitHub organization is here.

[$] A look at the 2024 Debian Project Leader election

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/967981/

The nominations have closed and campaigning is underway to see who
will be the next Debian
Project Leader
(DPL). This year, two
candidates
are campaigning for the position Jonathan Carter has
held for four eventful years: Sruthi Chandran and
Andreas Tille. Topics that have emerged so far include how the
prospective DPLs would spend project money, their opinions on handling
controversial topics, and project diversity.

[$] A focus on FOSS funding

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/967001/

Among the numerous approaches to funding the development and advancement of
open-source software, corporate sponsorship in the form of donations to umbrella
organizations is perhaps the most visible. At SCALE21x in Pasadena, California, Duane O’Brien
presented
a slice of his recent research into the landscape of such sponsorship arrangements,
with an overview of the identifiable trends of the past ten years and some initial
insights he hopes are valuable for sponsors and community members alike.

AlmaLinux OS – CVE-2024-1086 and XZ (AlmaLinux blog)

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/968299/

AlmaLinux has announced
updated kernels for AlmaLinux 8 and 9 to address CVE-2024-1086, a
use-after-free vulnerability in the kernel that could be exploited to
gain local privilege escalation. This is notable because the fix
marks a divergence between AlmaLinux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL):

In January of this year, a kernel flaw was disclosed and named CVE-2024-1086.
This flaw is trivially exploitable on most RHEL-equivalent
systems. There are many proof-of-concept posts available now,
including one from our Infrastructure team lead, Jonathan Wright (Dealing
with CVE-2024-1086
). In multi-user scenarios, this flaw is
especially problematic.

Though this was flagged as something to be fixed in Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, Red Hat has only rated this as a moderate
impact
.

The AlmaLinux project would also like to note that it is not
impacted by the XZ backdoor. “Because enterprise Linux takes a bit
longer to adopt those updates (sometimes to the chagrin of our users),
the version of XZ that had the back door inserted hadn’t made it
further than Fedora in our ecosystem.

Security updates for Wednesday

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/968218/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (py7zr), Fedora (biosig4c++ and podman), Oracle (kernel, kernel-container, and ruby:3.1), Red Hat (.NET 7.0, bind9.16, curl, expat, grafana, grafana-pcp, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, less, opencryptoki, and postgresql-jdbc), and Ubuntu (cacti).

[$] The race to replace Redis

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/966631/

On March 21, Redis Ltd. announced that the Redisin-memory data store” project would now be
released under non-free, source-available licenses, starting with Redis 7.4. The
news is unwelcome, but not entirely unexpected. What is unusual with this situation is
the number of Redis alternatives to choose from; there are at least
four options to choose as a replacement for those who wish to stay
with free software, including a pre-existing fork called KeyDB and the Linux Foundation’s newly-announced Valkey project. The question now is which one(s)
Linux distributions, users, and providers will choose to take its place.

Security updates for Wednesday

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/966835/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (composer and nodejs), Fedora (w3m), Mageia (tomcat), Oracle (expat, firefox, go-toolset:ol8, grafana, grafana-pcp, nodejs:18, and thunderbird), Red Hat (dnsmasq, expat, kernel, kernel-rt, libreoffice, and squid), and SUSE (firefox, krb5, libvirt, and shadow).

[$] Managing Linux servers with Cockpit

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/965434/

Cockpit is an interesting
project for web-based Linux administration that has received
relatively little attention over the years. Part of that may be due to
the project’s strategy of minor releases roughly every two weeks,
rather than larger releases with many new features. While the strategy
has done little to garner headlines, it has delivered a useful and
extensible tool to observe, manage, and troubleshoot Linux servers.

Python announces first security releases since becoming a CNA

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/966056/

The Python project has announced three security releases, 3.10.14,
3.9.19,
and 3.8.19.
In addition to the security fixes, these releases are notable for two reasons;
they are the first to make use of GitHub Actions to perform
public builds
instead of building artifacts “on a local computer of one
of the release managers
“, and the first since Python became a
CVE Numbering Authority
(CNA).

Python release team member Łukasz Langa said
that being a CNA means Python is able to “ensure the quality of the vulnerability
reports is high, and that the severity estimates are accurate.
” It also
allows Python to coordinate CVE announcements with the patched versions of
Python, as it has with two CVEs addressed in these releases. CVE-2023-6597
describes a flaw in CPython’s zipfile module that made it vulnerable to a zip-bomb exploit. CVE-2024-0450 is an
issue with Python’s tempfile.TemporaryDirectory class which could be
exploited to modify permissions of files referenced by symbolic links.
Users of affected versions should upgrade soon.

Security updates for Wednesday

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/966053/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (fontforge and imagemagick), Fedora (firefox), Mageia (cherrytree, python-django, qpdf, and sqlite3), Red Hat (bind, cups, emacs, fwupd, gmp, kernel, libreoffice, libX11, nodejs, opencryptoki, postgresql-jdbc, postgresql:10, postgresql:13, and ruby:3.1), Slackware (gnutls and mozilla), and Ubuntu (firefox, linux, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm,
linux-ibm-5.4, linux-iot, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.5, and linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15).

Mitchell: Today we launched Flox 1.0

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/965584/

Zach Mitchell has announced the 1.0 release of Flox, a tool that lets its users install packages from nixpkgs inside portable virtual environments, and share those virtual environments with others as an alternative to Docker-style containers. Flox is based on Nix but allows users to skip learning how to work with the Nix language:

With Flox we’re providing a substantially better user experience. We provide the suite of package manager functionality with install, uninstall, etc, but we also provide an entire new suite of functionality with the ability to share environments via flox push, flox pull, and flox activate --remote.

Flox is GPLv2-licensed, and releases are available as RPMs and Debian packages for x86_64 and arm64 systems.