Internet News Section
The release of the OPNsense 22.1 firewall distribution has taken place, which is a derivative of the pfSense project, created with the goal of forming a fully open distribution that can provide functionality on par with commercial solutions for deploying firewalls and network gateways. Unlike pfSense, the project is positioned as not being controlled by a single company and is developed with direct community involvement and has […]
A corrective release of Firefox 96.0.3 is now available, along with a new release of the long-term support branch, Firefox 91.5.1, which fixes a bug that, under certain circumstances, led to the transmission of excess data to the telemetry collection server. The overall share of unwanted data among all event records on the telemetry servers is estimated at 0.0013% for the desktop version of Firefox and 0.0005% for the Android version of Firefox […]
After two years of development, the ISC consortium has released the first stable version of the new significant branch of the DNS server BIND 9.18. Support for branch 9.18 will be provided for three years until the second quarter of 2025 as part of an extended maintenance cycle. Support for branch 9.11 will cease in March, and for branch 9.16 in mid-2023. To enhance functionality for the next stable version of BIND […]
The nonprofit certificate authority Let’s Encrypt, community-controlled and providing certificates free of charge to anyone, has announced an early revocation of approximately two million TLS certificates, which accounts for about 1% of all active certificates from this certificate authority. The revocation of certificates was initiated due to the discovery of non-compliance with specification requirements in the code used by Let’s Encrypt implementing the TLS-ALPN-01 extension (RFC 7301, Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation). […]
The SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) library's codebase now includes a default change that enables operation based on the Wayland protocol in environments that support both Wayland and X11 simultaneously. Previously, in Wayland environments with the XWayland component, output was activated using X11 by default, and applications needed to be launched with special settings to use Wayland. This change will be part of the release […]
The first release candidate of the web framework and content management system Zotonic has been released. The project is written in Erlang and distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. Zotonic is based on the concept of organizing content as 'resources' (also known as 'pages') and 'relations' between them ('article' - 'relates to' - 'topic', 'user' - 'author' - 'article'), where the relations themselves are also resources of the type 'relation' […]
The release of the free document layout package Scribus 1.5.8 has been published. It provides tools for professional printing layout, including flexible PDF generation tools and support for working with separate color profiles, CMYK, spot colors, and ICC. The system is developed using the Qt toolkit and is distributed under the GPLv2+ license. Ready binary builds are prepared for Linux (AppImage), macOS, and […]
In the nightly builds of Firefox, which will form the basis for the Firefox 98 release scheduled for March 8, support for the Wayland protocol is enabled by default for user environments that provide support for it. You can check the use of Wayland in Firefox on the 'about:support' page. Among the remaining unresolved issues, there are problems with tab drag-and-drop stuttering, submenu alignment issues, and problems with setting environment variables […]
Qualys has discovered a vulnerability (CVE-2021-4034) in the Polkit system component (formerly PolicyKit), which is used in distributions to organize the execution of actions requiring elevated access rights by unprivileged users. The vulnerability allows an unprivileged local user to elevate their privileges to that of the root user, thus gaining full control over the system. The issue has been dubbed PwnKit and is notable for the availability of a working exploit that operates under […]
After a year and a half of development, version 1.10.0 of RetroArch has been released, a frontend for emulating various gaming consoles that allows for playing classic games through a simple, unified graphical interface. Emulators for consoles such as Atari 2600/7800/Jaguar/Lynx, Game Boy, Mega Drive, NES, Nintendo 64/DS, PCEngine, PSP, Sega 32X/CD, SuperNES, and more are supported. Gamepads from existing gaming consoles can be used, including […]
The Polkit toolkit, used in distributions for handling authorization and determining access rules for operations requiring elevated permissions (such as mounting USB drives), has added a backend that allows the use of the embedded JavaScript engine Duktape instead of the previously used Mozilla Gecko engine (by default, builds continue to use the Mozilla engine). The JavaScript language in Polkit is used to define access rules, which […]
After two years of work, the Khronos consortium, responsible for developing graphic standards, has published the Vulkan 1.3 specification, which defines the API for accessing GPU graphics and computing capabilities. The new specification incorporates corrections and extensions accumulated over the two years. It is noted that the requirements of the Vulkan 1.3 specification are aimed at graphics hardware of the OpenGL ES 3.1 class, which will ensure support for the new […]