Blog Section
The maintainer of the Telegram Desktop packages for Fedora and RPM Fusion announced the removal of packages from the repositories. A day prior, the package maintainer for Gentoo also announced the discontinuation of support for Telegram Desktop. In both cases, there was a willingness to restore the packages to the repositories if a new maintainer can be found to take over the support. […]
The release of aTox 0.6.0 has taken place — a new version of the free mobile messenger with open source, which uses the Tox protocol (c-toxcore). Tox offers a decentralized P2P model for message distribution, utilizing cryptographic methods for user identification and protecting transit traffic from interception. The application is written in Kotlin. The source code and ready-made builds of the application are distributed under the GNU GPLv3 license. Features of aTox: […]
The release of the interactive command shell fish 3.2.0 (friendly interactive shell) has been published, evolving as a more user-friendly alternative to bash and zsh. Fish supports features such as syntax highlighting with automatic error detection, suggestions for input based on the history of past operations, and the auto-completion of options and commands using their descriptions in man pages, all working out of the box […]
A vulnerability (CVE-2021-27803) has been identified in the wpa_supplicant package, which is used for connecting to wireless networks in many Linux distributions, *BSD, and Android. This vulnerability could potentially be exploited to execute code by an attacker when processing specially crafted control frames for Wi-Fi Direct (Wi-Fi P2P). To carry out an attack, the attacker must be within the range of the wireless network to send the victim a specially crafted […]
The developers of the Linux Mint distribution plan to redesign the update manager in the next release to encourage users to keep the distribution up to date. A study showed that only about 30% of users install updates in a timely manner, within a week of their release. Linux Mint does not collect telemetry, so an indirect method based on analysis was used to assess the relevance of the distribution components […]
A correction release of OpenVPN 2.5.1 has been prepared. This package allows the creation of virtual private networks, enabling encrypted connections between two client machines or facilitating the operation of a centralized VPN server for multiple clients. OpenVPN code is distributed under the GPLv2 license, and ready-made binary packages are available for Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, and Windows. New features: A new connection state AUTH_PENDING has been added to the connection states list, […]
The developers of the Void Linux distribution have approved the proposal that has been under consideration since April of last year to revert to the use of the OpenSSL library. The switch from LibreSSL to OpenSSL is scheduled for March 5. It is expected that this change will not affect the systems of most users, but it will significantly simplify the maintenance of the distribution and resolve many issues, for example, enabling OpenVPN to be built with the standard TLS library (currently due to issues […]
The development version of the Linux kernel 5.12 includes the implementation of the KFence (Kernel Electric Fence) mechanism, which checks memory operations, catching buffer overflows, accessing memory after it has been freed, and other similar errors. This functionality was already present in the kernel as a KASAN (kernel address sanitizer) build option, utilizing Address Sanitizer in modern GCC […]
Chrome developers have announced the addition of a new experimental setting in the test branches of Chrome Canary, Dev, and Beta, ‘chrome://flags#omnibox-default-typed-navigations-to-https’, which, when activated, will cause sites to open by default using the ‘https://’ scheme instead of ‘http://’ when typing host names in the address bar. This feature is scheduled to be enabled by default in the upcoming release of Chrome 89 on March 2 for a small […]
Mozilla has assured users that it will not abandon the image of the fox in the Firefox logo. In recent days, misinformation about the disappearance of the fox from the Firefox logo has been actively discussed online, leading to memes and outrage. The Firefox logos have not changed since 2019, and the logo without the fox, presented in discussions as the new Firefox logo, is not supported.
Nearly two years after the last significant release, the Linux distribution Mageia 8 has been released, developed by an independent community of enthusiasts from the Mandriva project. Both 32-bit and 64-bit DVD builds (4 GB) and a set of Live builds (3 GB) based on GNOME, KDE, and Xfce are available for download. Key improvements: Updated package versions, including Linux kernel 5.10.16, glibc 2.32, and more.
An experimental release of the open implementation of WinAPI—Wine 6.3—has occurred. Since the release of version 6.2, 24 bug reports have been closed and 456 changes have been made. The most important changes are improved debugger support in the system call interface. The WineGStreamer library has been converted to the PE executable file format. The support for WinRT IDL (Interface Definition Language) has been expanded in the WIDL (Wine Interface Definition Language) compiler.