Internet News Section
Firefox 80 is now available. There is a new feature allowing users to set Firefox as the system's default PDF viewer. The loading and processing of lists of malicious and problematic extensions has been significantly sped up. This feature will be ported to the ESR version, as maintaining two different 'blacklist' formats is cumbersome, and the developers were unable to incorporate the change into the 78 release (on which the current ESR branch is based) due to a last-minute issue […]
On August 25, 1991, after five months of development, 21-year-old student Linus Torvalds announced in the comp.os.minix newsgroup the creation of a working prototype of the new operating system Linux, marking the completion of the porting of bash 1.08 and gcc 1.40. The first public release of the Linux kernel was presented on September 17. Kernel 0.0.1 was 62 KB in compressed form and contained […]
The release of the Linux distribution Armbian 20.08 has been presented, providing a compact operating environment for various single-board computers based on ARM processors, including different models of Odroid, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, pine64, Nanopi, and Cubieboard using Allwinner, Amlogic, Actionsemi, Freescale / NXP, Marvell Armada, Rockchip, and Samsung Exynos processors. The builds are based on Ubuntu 18.04 and Debian 10 repositories, […]
The registrar APNIC, responsible for the distribution of IP addresses in the Asia-Pacific region, has published the results of an analysis of traffic distribution on one of the root DNS servers a.root-servers.net. 45.80% of the queries to the root server were related to checks performed by browsers based on the Chromium engine. Thus, almost half of the resources of root DNS servers are spent on performing diagnostic checks for Chromium rather than processing requests from DNS servers during […]
A new version of the XMPP client Kaidan 0.6.0 is available. The program is written in C++ using Qt, QXmpp, and the Kirigami framework. The code is distributed under the GPLv3 license. Builds have been prepared for Linux (AppImage and flatpak) and Android. The release of builds for macOS and Windows is delayed. A key improvement in the new version is the implementation of an offline message queue—messages are now stored […] when there is no network connection.
Zextras has started the formation and publication of ready-to-use builds of the Zimbra 9 collaboration and email package, marketed as an alternative to MS Exchange. Builds are available for Ubuntu and RHEL (260 MB). Previously, Synacor, which oversees the development of Zimbra, announced it would cease publishing binary builds of the Zimbra Open Source Edition and intends to develop Zimbra 9 as a proprietary product without […].
Here’s what’s new in Kotlin 1.4.0: A new, more powerful type inference algorithm is enabled by default. It automatically infers types in more cases, supports smart-cast even in complex scenarios, better handles delegated properties, and much more. New IR backends for JVM and JS are available in alpha mode. Once stabilized, they will be used by default. In Kotlin 1.4 […].
Google has begun implementing a new Raw Sockets API in Chrome, allowing web applications to establish direct network connections using TCP and UDP protocols. In 2015, the W3C consortium attempted to standardize the "TCP and UDP Socket" API, but the working group members did not reach consensus, and the development of this API was halted. The need to add a new API […]
Mozilla has made the Firefox Relay service available for testing to all interested users. Previously, access to Firefox Relay was by invitation only, but now it is available to any user with a Firefox Account. Firefox Relay allows users to generate temporary email addresses for signing up on websites, helping to protect their real addresses. Users are allowed […]
A vulnerability (CVE-2020-14367) has been identified in chrony, the NTP protocol implementation used for synchronizing accurate time across various Linux distributions, which allows overwriting any file in the system with access to the local unprivileged chrony user. The vulnerability can only be exploited through the chrony user, which reduces its danger. However, the issue compromises the isolation level in chrony and can be utilized in […]
QNAP Systems has announced the QXP-10G2U3A expansion card designed for use in personal computers, workstations, and network-attached storage (NAS). The new card allows the system to be equipped with two USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A ports. This interface provides a bandwidth of up to 10 Gbps. The card is based on the ASMedia ASM3142 controller. A PCIe Gen2 x2 slot is required for installation. It is said to be compatible with […]
Corrective updates have been released for the stable branches of the DNS server BIND 9.11.22 and 9.16.6, as well as for the experimental branch 9.17.4 currently in development. The new releases fix five vulnerabilities. The most critical vulnerability (CVE-2020-8620) allows remote denial of service to be triggered by sending a specific set of packets to the TCP port on which BIND accepts connections. Sending abnormally large AXFR requests to the TCP port may lead to […]