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The LWN.net Weekly Edition for November 10, 2016 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
Over at Linux Journal, Susan Sons has a lengthy article on security exercises, which are a way to test the readiness of a project or organization for some kind of security problem. "Scheduling exercises at a predictable time and reminding others when it will happen prevents confusion among staff. It is wise to begin with low-impact exercises (more on this below) that don't leverage production systems, and move on to higher-potential-impact exercises only when the organization's infrastructure and personnel have had most of the bugs shaken out. If something as small as a runaway process on a single server can seriously impact your business, it's better to find out at a planned time with all hands on deck than at 4am on a holiday when no one who knows what to do can be reached. The whole point of security exercises is to increase resilience: raise the threshold of what is normal for your team to deal with, what your systems can shrug off." She followed that article up with some example security exercises.
Neil Brown writes: "For a little longer than a year now, I have been using Notmuch as my primary means of reading email. Though the experience has not been without some annoyances, I feel that it has been a net improvement and expect to keep using Notmuch for quite some time." Click below (subscribers only) for his full report.
Debian has updated pillow (two vulnerabilities).
Fedora has updated jasper (F23: multiple vulnerabilities), kdepimlibs (F23: three vulnerabilities), libXi (F23: two vulnerabilities), and xen (F23: multiple vulnerabilities).
Mageia has updated freeimage (two vulnerabilities, one from 2015).
openSUSE has updated curl (42.1: multiple vulnerabilities), flash-player (13.2: multiple vulnerabilities), gd (42.1: three vulnerabilities), ImageMagick (42.1: multiple vulnerabilities, some from 2014 and 2015), and mysql-community-server (42.1, 13.2: multiple vulnerabilities, many unspecified).
Oracle has updated 389-ds-base (OL7: unspecified), bind (OL7: denial of service), curl (OL7: TLS botch), dhcp (OL7: unspecified), firewalld (OL7: authentication bypass), fontconfig (OL7: privilege escalation), gimp (OL7: code execution), glibc (OL7: code execution), java-1.7.0-openjdk (OL7: unspecified), kernel (OL7: multiple vulnerabilities, some from 2013 and 2015), krb5 (OL7: two vulnerabilities), libgcrypt (OL7: bad random numbers), libguestfs (OL7: information leak from 2015), libreoffice (OL7: code execution), libreswan (OL7: denial of service), libvirt (OL7: three vulnerabilities, two from 2015), mariadb (OL7: privilege escalation), mod_nss (OL7: cipher choosing botch), nettle (OL7: multiple vulnerabilities, three from 2015), NetworkManager (OL7: information leak), ntp (OL7: multiple vulnerabilities from 2015), openssh (OL7: privilege escalation from 2015), php (OL7: multiple vulnerabilities), poppler (OL7: code execution from 2015), postgresql (OL7: two vulnerabilities), python (OL7: code execution), qemu-kvm (OL7: two vulnerabilities), resteasy-base (OL7: code execution), squid (OL7: multiple vulnerabilities), sudo (OL7: information disclosure), systemd (OL7: denial of service), tomcat (OL7: multiple vulnerabilities, three from 2015), util-linux (OL7: denial of service), and wget (OL7: code execution).
Ubuntu has updated kernel (16.10; 16.04: denial of service), kernel (14.04: multiple vulnerabilities, one from 2014 and 2015), kernel (12.04: two vulnerabilities), linux-lts-trusty (12.04: multiple vulnerabilities, one from 2014 and 2015), linux-lts-xenial (14.04: denial of service), linux-raspi2 (16.10: denial of service), linux-snapdragon (16.04: denial of service), and linux-ti-omap4 (12.04: two vulnerabilities).
Dave Täht has been working to save the Internet for the last six years (at least). Recently, his focus has been on improving the performance of networking over WiFi — performance that has been disappointing for as long as anybody can remember. The good news, as related in his 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference talk, is that WiFi can be fixed, and the fixes aren't even all that hard to do. Users with the right hardware and a willingness to run experimental software can have fast WiFi now, and it should be available for the rest of us before too long.
Christian Schaller writes that, after all these years, a stock Fedora system will be able to play MP3 files. "I know this has been a big wishlist item for a long time for a lot of people so I am really happy that we are finally in a position to fulfill that wish. You should be able to download the mp3 plugin on day 1 through GNOME Software or through the missing codec installer in various GStreamer applications. For Fedora Workstation 26 I would not be surprised if we decide to ship it on the install media."
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for November 3, 2016 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
The opening session at the 2016 Kernel Summit, led by Jiri Kosina, had to do with the process of creating stable kernel updates. There is, he said, a bit of a disconnect between what the various parties involved want, and that has led to trouble for the consumers of the stable kernel releases.
Click below (subscribers only) for the first article from LWN's 2016 Kernel Summit coverage
Fedora has updated chromium (F24: multiple vulnerabilities), chromium-native_client (F24: multiple vulnerabilities), dracut (F24: information disclosure), jasper (F24: multiple vulnerabilities), and xen (F24: multiple vulnerabilities).
Mageia has updated flash-player-plugin (multiple vulnerabilities), kernel (multiple vulnerabilities), and mariadb (multiple vulnerabilities).
Red Hat has updated kernel (RHEL7.2: denial of service) and systemd (RHEL7.2: denial of service).
SUSE has updated php5 (SLE12: three vulnerabilities).
Ubuntu has updated qemu, qemu-kvm (multiple vulnerabilities).
The Rowhammer vulnerability affects hardware at the deepest levels. It has proved to be surprisingly exploitable on a number of different systems, leaving security-oriented developers at a loss. Since it is a hardware vulnerability, it would appear that solutions, too, must be placed in the hardware. Now, though, an interesting software-based mitigation mechanism is under discussion on the linux-kernel mailing list. The ultimate effectiveness of this defense is unproven, but it does show that there may be hope for a solution that doesn't require buying new computers.
Debian has updated libxslt (code execution).
Fedora has updated dbus (F23: code execution), firefox (F23: two vulnerabilities), and pacemaker (F23: privilege escalation).
openSUSE has updated mariadb (13.2: multiple vulnerabilities) and nodejs (Leap42.1, 13.2: code execution).
Red Hat has updated flash-plugin (RHEL5,6: multiple vulnerabilities).
Scientific Linux has updated libgcrypt (SL6: flawed random number generation) and pacemaker (SL6: privilege escalation).
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 27, 2016 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
The digiKam Software Collection 5.3.0 has been released. This version is available as an AppImage bundle. "AppImage is an open-source project dedicated to provide a simple way to distribute portable software as compressed binary file, that standard user can run as well, without to install special dependencies. All is included into the bundle, as last Qt5 and KF5 frameworks. AppImage use Fuse file-system, which is de-compressed into a temporary directory to start the application. You don't need to install digiKam on your system to be able to use it. Better, you can use the official digiKam from your Linux distribution in parallel, and test the new version without any conflict with one used in production. This permit to quickly test a new release without to wait an official package dedicated for your Linux box. Another AppImage advantage is to be able to provide quickly a pre-release bundle to test last patches applied to source code, outside the releases plan."
Just about everyone who runs a Unix server on the internet uses SSH for remote access, and almost everyone who does that will be familiar with the log footprints of automated password-guessing bots. Although decently-secure passwords do much to harden a server against such attacks, the costs of dealing with the continual stream of failed logins can be considerable. There are ways to mitigate these costs.
The second service pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Desktop and other products, has been released. Highlights include software defined networking and network function virtualization, the new SUSE Package Hub for package updates, the ability to skip service pack releases (e.g. upgrade from SLES 12 to SLES 12-SP2), architecture support for AArch64 and Raspberry Pi, and much more.
We live in an era of celebrity vulnerabilities; at the moment, an unpleasant kernel bug called "Dirty COW" (or CVE-2016-5195) is taking its turn on the runway. This one is more disconcerting than many due to its omnipresence and the ease with which it can be exploited. But there is also some unhappiness in the wider community about how this vulnerability has been handled by the kernel development community. It may well be time for the kernel project to rethink its approach to serious security problems.
Debian has updated mat (information leak) and openjdk-7 (multiple vulnerabilities).
Debian-LTS has updated python-imaging (two vulnerabilities).
Fedora has updated ansible (F24: two vulnerabilities), ghostscript (F24: two vulnerabilities), icu (F24: code execution), java-1.8.0-openjdk-aarch32 (F24: multiple vulnerabilities), and kernel (F24: two vulnerabilities).
openSUSE has updated bind (Leap42.1; 13.2: denial of service).
Oracle has updated java-1.7.0-openjdk (OL6; OL5: multiple vulnerabilities) and libgcrypt (OL6: flawed random number generation).
Red Hat has updated chromium-browser (RHEL6: memory leak), libgcrypt (RHEL6,7: flawed random number generation), pacemaker (RHEL6: privilege escalation), and qemu-kvm-rhev (RHOSP8; RHOSP9: denial of service).
Scientific Linux has updated java-1.7.0-openjdk (SL5,6: multiple vulnerabilities).
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 20, 2016 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
HackerBoards takes a look at the 64-bit Orange Pi. "Shenzhen Xunlong is keeping up its prolific pace in spinning off new Allwinner SoCs into open source SBCs, and now it has released its first 64-bit ARM model, and one of the cheapest quad-core -A53 boards around. The Orange Pi PC 2 runs Linux or Android on a new Allwinner H5 SoC featuring four Cortex-A53 cores and a more powerful Mali-450 GPU."
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