News from the Planet

This was a little idea gnawing at the back of my brain. The humble barcode has been in use since the 1970s. In the next few years it will likely be replaced with a 2D QR Code. I couldn't find anyone who'd made a QR code with an embedded UPC - so I decided to make one. If you move your phone…

--> --> Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma! This week Plasma 6.7 received a few more stabilization bug-fixes while attention turned towards the upcoming 6.8 release. Some exciting changes are in progress, and a few have already merged, including highly visible improvements to some…

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 26 to July 3. Third Party Projects Haydn Trowell says The latest version of Typesetter updates the built-in Typst compiler to version 0.15, which brings a long-awaited feature: variable font support – no more warnings and faulty…

Tellico 4.2.1 is available, with some improvements and bug fixes. Improvements: Added user-defined data fetch argument (Bug 516055). Updated Google Scholar and Colnect data sources. Updated Google Books data source (Bug 522095). Updated external data source to allow termination by user (Bug…

Recently a person reported a bug in APT saying that TLS is failing on FIPS systems with MD5 errors, and suggested we call ERR_clear_error() around TLS operations. Like any serious software engineer would do, I said No. Just because one component failed to handle its errors does not mean I can go…

The GNU Guix project has announced three vulnerabilities in the guix substitute utility as well as a fourth that affects the guix pull and guix time-machine commands. The impact of the vulnerabilities ranges from remote privilege escalation to local disclosure of sensitive files. The remote…

Over the past few weeks, I have been writing the backend for the vocabulary-puzzle generator for Crosswords. But what entirely dictates a valid word placement whilst being mindful of all edge cases and managing the state of the puzzle upon the exploration of possible solutions? Finding valid…

With Keir Starmer recently losing a Defence Secretary and then leaving a budgetary timebomb for his successor as PM, Andy Burnham, I thought it might be interesting to see how we rank on defence spending and who are the world’s largest exporters and importers of arms. I started out by trying to…

A number of problems related to negative directory entries (dentries) were the topic of a filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Negative dentries are used to indicate that a file of a given name does not exist in a directory; it is an…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds-base, bind9.18, evince, fence-agents, freerdp, frr, frr10, gimp, gnutls, hplip, jmc, mariadb:11.8, mysql:8.4, php:7.4, postgresql-jdbc, postgresql:15, postgresql:16, valkey, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Debian (fastnetmon),…

My Debian contributions this month were all sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay or GitHub Sponsors. Thanks to new sponsor @fernandocc17! bugs.debian.org documentation Sometimes I ask users to file bugs upstream themselves because I think they’d be better…

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-27. What happened to the fight for the Internet? Tags: tech, politics, surveillance Excellent piece, where are the netizens who should be fighting back those bills? Looks like we became very complacent and passivity reigns this time around. Didn’t think…

During London Tech Week, Mozilla hosted the first UK edition of Mozilla Mornings, our breakfast-discussion series on the digital questions of the moment. We brought together technologists, policymakers, industry, civil society and researchers to ask how the UK can drive forward responsible…

A couple of months ago I improved some of our dialogs and this time I worked on some more. Did you know that you can just paste the clipboard’s content into the Dolphin file manager or on the desktop to create a new file from it? Just paste your clipboard’s content to create a new…

As is the case for many people working in the security industry, the last few months of my life have been focused on dealing with people wanting to use LLMs everywhere. From an enterprise security perspective that’s not an inherent problem - what’s more of a problem is that people want those…

As is the case for many people working in the security industry, the last few months of my life have been focused on dealing with people wanting to use LLMs everywhere. From an enterprise security perspective that’s not an inherent problem - what’s more of a problem is that people want those…

In August 2025, the CalyxOS privacy-focused Android distribution announced that it was pausing all releases while it reworked its release process, security protocols, and changed its signing keys following the departure of one of its founders. The project has now announced that it is "officially…

A few astute observers have noticed that some content on kernel.org had disappeared and were understandably concerned. Konstantin Ryabitsev has provided an update via social.kernel.org: There was an unfortunate error while changing the kernel.org primary/secondary mirroring infrastructure, which…

We were made aware today of an email sent to a reader that was spoofed to appear to be from LWN. The message claimed, among other things, that we were providing personal information about the reader to another site user. As is explained in our privacy policy we do not, and would not, provide such…

Aoife Moloney has, on behalf of the Fedora Council, posted an announcement that the Fedora Council is "proposing we pause the Community Initiatives process as an official project process" because it has decided the current process is ineffective. It is also closing discussion regarding the AI…

It’s overdue, but here is my first progress update. If you haven’t read my introductory post, the short version: I’m implementing GPU reset recovery in Mutter, the Wayland compositor at the heart of GNOME Shell. When the GPU encounters a hardware- or driver-level fault and resets, invalidating the…

I've spent about 100 hours of work over the past month to make sure git-annex can build without dependencies that contain LLM generated code. At least so far. https://git-annex.branchable.com/no_llm_code/ Needing to review a program's whole dependency tree on an ongoing basis is apparently what…

The kernel community (like many other free-software projects) has recently seen a large influx of patches developed with the assistance of large language models (LLMs). Those patches tend to come from developers who were previously unknown to the community. At the moment, though,…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (giflib, kernel, mariadb:10.11, mod_http2, php, rrdtool, ruby, ruby:3.3, and ruby:4.0), Debian (jq and node-lodash), Fedora (caddy, hut, ipp-usb, kernel, opkssh, rclone, thunderbird, and transmission), SUSE (389-ds, 7zip, alsa, amazon-ecs-init, avahi,…

This week I shipped two new features for KeepSecret. KWallet XML Import (!34) The Import menu on the wallet page is now a submenu with two options: -KeepSecret…</p>-KWallet XML…</p>Both import formats are converted into the same internal format, allowing them to use the existing import code. I only…