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Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 5.4.266, 4.19.304, and 4.14.335 stable kernels. They contain important fixes throughout the kernel tree.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (exim4), Fedora (chromium, perl-Spreadsheet-ParseExcel, python-aiohttp, python-pysqueezebox, and tinyxml), Gentoo (Apache Batik, Eclipse Mosquitto, firefox, R, Synapse, and util-linux), Mageia (libssh2 and putty), Red Hat (squid), SUSE (libxkbcommon), and Ubuntu (gnutls28).

Linus has released the 6.7 kernel. End result: 6.7 is (in number of commits: over 17k non-merge commits, with 1k+ merges) one of the largest kernel releases we've ever had, but the extra rc8 week was purely due to timing with the holidays, not about any difficulties with the larger release. Some of the headline features in this release are: the removal of support...

Kernel developers often go out of their way to reduce the memory used by the kernel itself; that memory is not available for the workloads that people are actually interested in running on their systems. Lower memory usage also tends to lead to better performance overall. But there are times when the expenditure of some extra memory can make the system faster. The replication...

The 6.6.10, 6.1.71, 5.15.146, and 5.10.206 stable kernels have been released. They contain numerous important fixes, as usual.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (asterisk, chromium, exim4, netatalk, and tomcat9), Fedora (chromium), Gentoo (BlueZ, c-ares, CUPS filters, RDoc, and WebKitGTK+), Oracle (firefox, squid:4, thunderbird, and tigervnc), SUSE (python-aiohttp and python-paramiko), and Ubuntu (linux-intel-iotg).

The saga of the None-aware (or null-coalescing) operators for Python continues. We last looked in on the topic a little over a year ago and noted that either adoption or a clear rejection of the idea might help tamp down its regular recurrence. That has not happened, so, predictably, it was raised again—and does not look any closer to resolution this time around.

ITWire covers the passing of Niklaus Wirth. Wirth is well-remembered for his pioneering work in programming languages and algorithms. For these achievements, he received the ACM Turing Award in 1984, inducted as a Fellow of the ACM in 1994, and a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2004. They include, among many, being chief designer for the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966),...

Security updates have been issued by Oracle (firefox, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, thunderbird, tigervnc, and xorg-x11-server), Red Hat (squid:4), SUSE (exim, libcryptopp, and proftpd), and Ubuntu (openssh and sqlite3).

Normally, when a new vulnerability is discovered and releases are coordinated with those affected, the announcement is done at a convenient time—not generally right before the end-of-year holidays, for example. The SMTP Smuggling vulnerability has taken a different path, however, with its announcement landing on December 18. That may well have been unpleasant for some administrators that had not yet updated, but it was particularly...

On his blog, Luc Lenôtre introduces Maestro, "a Unix-like kernel and operating system written from scratch in Rust". Maestro is intended to be "lightweight and compatible-enough with Linux to be usable in everyday life". The project began, in C, back in 2018, but switched over to Rust after a year-and-a-half. The current status: Maestro is a monolithic kernel, supporting only the x86 (in 32...

Version 9.1 of the Vim editor has been released. "This release is dedicated to Bram Moolenaar, Vim's lead developer for more than 30 years, who passed away half a year ago. The Vim project wouldn't exist without his work". Changes include new support for classes and objects in the scripting language, smooth scrolling support, an EditorConfig plugin, and more.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel), Fedora (slurm), Oracle (kernel and postgresql:15), Red Hat (firefox, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, thunderbird, tigervnc, and xorg-x11-server), SUSE (polkit, postfix, putty, w3m, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (nodejs).