Uutissyötteet

LWN.net is a comprehensive source of news and opinions from and about the Linux community. This is the main LWN.net feed, listing all articles which are posted to the site front page.

Upton: Raspberry Pi: Two things you thought you weren’t going to get
Liz Upton reports that Raspberry Pi boards will be available by the end of the month. "There’s another big piece of news today. We’ve been leaning (gently and charmingly) on Broadcom, who make BCM2835, the SoC at the heart of the Raspberry Pi, to produce an abbreviated datasheet describing the ARM peripherals in the chip. If you’re a casual user, this won’t be of much interest to you, but if you’re wanting to port your own operating system or just want to understand our Linux kernel sources, this is the document for you." (Thanks to Paul Wise)
Tuesday's security updates
CentOS has updated C5: openssl (multiple vulnerabilities).
Debian has updated php5 (remote code execution).
Mandriva has updated glpi (information disclosure).
Red Hat has updated MRG (RHEL6; RHEL5: denial of service).
SUSE has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities) and tomcat6 (multiple vulnerabilities).
Ubuntu has updated OMAP kernel (denial of service/code execution).
Langley: Revocation checking and Chrome's CRL
On his blog, Adam Langley writes about plans for removing online certificate revocation checking in the Chrome/Chromium browser. Instead of OCSP and CRL checks, Google will be pushing lists of revoked certificates to the browser. "While the benefits of online revocation checking are hard to find, the costs are clear: online revocation checks are slow and compromise privacy. The median time for a successful OCSP check is ~300ms and the mean is nearly a second. This delays page loading and discourages sites from using HTTPS. They are also a privacy concern because the CA learns the IP address of users and which sites they're visiting. [...] On this basis, we're currently planning on disabling online revocation checks in a future version of Chrome. (There is a class of higher-security certificate, called an EV certificate, where we haven't made a decision about what to do yet.)"
Jared Smith steps down as Fedora project leader
Fedora project leader Jared Smith has announced that he is moving on. "I'm happy to announce that Red Hat has selected Robyn Bergeron to be the next Fedora Project Leader. Robyn has proven herself in the Fedora community over the last several years, and I have complete confidence in her abilities to lead the Fedora Project. In addition to planning FUDCon Tempe in 2011 and helping to lead the Marketing and Cloud SIGs within Fedora, Robyn has been an integral part of many other Fedora events and endeavors. Most recently, she has held the role of Fedora Program Manager, helping to ensure that we all stay on schedule and helping the Fedora feature process stay on track."
Canonical pulls funding from Kubuntu
Kubuntu lead developer Jonathan Riddell has sent out an announcement that Canonical will no longer be funding work on the KDE-based Kubuntu distribution. "The practical changes are I won't be able to work on KDE bits in my work time after 12.04 and there won't be paid support for versions after 12.04. This is a rational business decision, Kubuntu has not been a business success after 7 years of trying, and it is unrealistic to expect it to continue to have financial resources put into it."
Mueller: Apple's iterative approach to FRAND abuse is not for the faint of heart
Florian Mueller's update on the patent battles between Apple, Motorola, and Samsung has a clear slant, but it is still a worthwhile look at how the mobile patent wars may be settled. There is little cheer for the free software world here. "They hope that the disruptive impact of such injunctions on Apple's business will force Apple to grant them a license to all of its non-standards-related patents (such as its multitouch inventions) as part of a broader settlement. In other words, they want to use FRAND patents to reach a state of 'mutually assured destruction', in which the notion of intellectual property would become meaningless between large players that have a critical mass of patents (it would merely serve to exclude new entrants without large patent portfolios)."
Stable kernels 3.0.20 and 3.2.5
The 3.0.20 and 3.2.5 stable kernel updates have been released. They are single-patch updates containing the fix to the ASPM-related problem that would significantly increase power consumption on some systems. This patch has been treated with some care: it seems to work, but nobody really knows if it might cause behavioral problems on some obscure hardware. That said, at this point, it seems safe enough to have found its way into a stable update.
Security advisories for Monday
Debian has updated cacti (fixes a regression in the previous update), xen-qemu-dm (code execution), and apache2 (multiple vulnerabilities).
Fedora has updated bip (F16; F15: code execution).
Oracle has updated php OL6; OL5; OL4: denial of service/remote code execution), ghostscript (OL6; OL5; OL4: multiple vulnerabilities), and OL5: php53 (remote code execution).
SUSE has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).
Ubuntu has updated firefox (multiple vulnerabilities), mozvoikko (multiple vulnerabilities), and ubufox & webfav (multiple vulnerabilities).
Five open source hardware projects that could change the world (The H)
Here's a lengthy survey of open hardware projects in The H. "The price/performance of a general purpose computer built using FPGAs wouldn't be great when compared with commodity gear, but the technology excels in many niche and specialist applications, such as in areas of computing that make use of dedicated hardware to bring high performance to tasks such as signal processing, encryption and networking. Since you can program many hardware paths in an FPGA they are well suited to jobs that can be broken down and processed in parallel, and some of the more powerful devices pack millions of logic blocks and have a transistor count well into the billions, with a blisteringly fast serial bandwidth that is measured in terabits/second."
"Open Advice" from 42 free software contributors
"Open Advice" is a new book consisting of essays from some 42 community authors; it is available in print form or downloadable under the CC-BY-SA license. "This book is the answer to 'What would you have liked to know when you started contributing?'. The authors give insights into the many different talents it takes to make a successful software project, coding of course but also design, translation, marketing and other skills. We are here to give you a head start if you are new. And if you have been contributing for a while already, we are here to give you some insight into other areas and projects."