Blog Section
Richard Fontana, one of the authors of the GPLv3 license and a consultant on open licenses and patents at Red Hat, announced plans to amend the Fedora project rules to prohibit the inclusion of software licensed under Creative Commons CC0 in the repositories. The CC0 license implies a waiver of the author's rights, distributing work as public domain, […]
The developers of the YaST installer used in openSUSE and SUSE Linux have released an update for the experimental D-Installer 0.4, which supports installation management through a web interface. At the same time, installation images have been prepared for exploring the capabilities of D-Installer, providing means for installing the continuously updated openSUSE Tumbleweed edition, as well as the Leap 15.4 and Leap Micro 5.2 releases. D-Installer separates the user interface from […]
The release of NsCDE 2.2 (Not so Common Desktop Environment) has been announced, which develops a desktop environment with a retro interface in the style of CDE (Common Desktop Environment), adapted for use on modern Unix-like systems and Linux. The environment is based on the FVWM window manager with themes, applications, patches, and add-ons to recreate the original CDE desktop. The project's code is distributed under the […]
A vulnerability has been discovered in the Grails web framework, designed for developing web applications according to the MVC paradigm in Java, Groovy, and other JVM languages, allowing remote code execution in the environment where the web application is running. Exploitation of the vulnerability occurs through the submission of a specially crafted request that provides the attacker access to the ClassLoader. The issue is caused by an oversight in the data-binding logic, […]
The Openwall project has released version 0.9.4 of the LKRG kernel module (Linux Kernel Runtime Guard), which is intended to detect and block attacks and integrity violations of kernel structures. For instance, the module can protect against unauthorized modifications to a running kernel and attempts to alter the privileges of user processes (which defines exploit use). The module is suitable for providing protection against exploits exploiting already known kernel vulnerabilities, […]
After a year of development, version 6.0 of the document-oriented database MongoDB has been released, which occupies a niche between fast and scalable key/value-based systems and relational databases that are functional and convenient for query formation. The MongoDB code is written in C++ and is distributed under the SSPL license, which is based on the AGPLv3 license but is not open because it contains discriminatory […]
After six months of development, the multimedia package FFmpeg 5.1 is now available, which includes a set of applications and a collection of libraries for operations on various multimedia formats (recording, transforming, and decoding audio and video formats). The package is distributed under the LGPL and GPL licenses, and FFmpeg development is carried out in parallel with the MPlayer project. The significant version number change is explained by substantial changes in the API and the transition to a new formation scheme, […]
A corrected release of the Apache OpenOffice 4.1.13 office suite is now available, featuring 7 fixes. Packaged versions are ready for Linux, Windows, and macOS. This new release notes the resolution of a vulnerability, details of which have not yet been provided, but it is mentioned that the issue is related to the master password. The new release alters the method of encoding and storing the master password, so users should take care before installing version 4.1.13 […]
The vSMTP project is developing a new mail server (MTA) aimed at delivering high performance and flexible traffic filtering and management capabilities. The project's code is written in Rust and is released under the GPLv3 license. According to the testing results published by the developers, vSMTP is ten times faster than competing MTAs. For example, vSMTP demonstrated performance that is 4 to 13 times higher […]
Feral Interactive has released GameMode 1.7, an optimizer implemented as a background process that on-the-fly adjusts various Linux system settings for optimal performance of gaming applications. The project's code is written in C and is distributed under the BSD license. For games, a special library called libgamemode is provided, which allows the request of specific optimizations during gameplay without […]
A vulnerability has been identified in the Linux kernel (CVE-2022-21505) that easily circumvents the Lockdown protection mechanism, which restricts root user access to the kernel and blocks UEFI Secure Boot bypass paths. To exploit this, the kernel's IMA (Integrity Measurement Architecture) subsystem can be used, which is designed to verify the integrity of operating system components via digital signatures and hashes. In lockdown mode, access to /dev/mem is restricted […]
Oracle has released a corrective update for the VirtualBox virtualization system version 6.1.36, which includes 27 fixes. Key changes: Addressed a potential kernel crash of the guest system with Linux when enabling the ‘Speculative Store Bypass’ protection mode for a single vCPU VM. Resolved a mouse usage issue in the virtual machine configuration dialog that occurs when using KDE. Improved update performance […]