The Thunderbird project has announced that it is making its Release channel the default download beginning with the 135.0 release in March. This will move users to major monthly releases instead of the annual major Extended Support Release (ESR) that is the current default.
One of our goals for 2025 is to increase active installations on the release channel to at least 20% of the total installations. At last check, we had 29,543 active installations on the release channel, compared to 20,918 on beta, and 5,941 on daily. The release channel installations currently account for 0.27% of the 10,784,551 total active installations tracked on stats.thunderbird.net.
Version 6.9 of the Incus container and virtual-machine management system has been released. Changes include a command to provide virtual machine memory dumps, ability to set network ACLs for instances on bridged networks, and more.
We will also be creating special EPUB books at times. As an example of what is possible, our complete coverage from Kangrejos 2024 and the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit are available to all readers.
There are surely places where our EPUB books can be improved; please feel free to drop us a note (at lwn@lwn.net) with suggestions.
Security researcher RyotaK has shared a series of vulnerabilities that all have to do with how Git interfaces with external credential managers. In short, while Git guards against newline characters (\n) being injected into a repository's URL, some programming languages also treat carriage return characters (\r) as being newlines. Adding a carriage return to a repository's URL can cause Git and the credential manager to disagree on how the URL should be parsed, ultimately resulting in Git credentials being sent to the wrong host. Malicious repositories could include Git submodules with malformed URLs, triggering the bug. Only password-based authentication with an external credential manager is vulnerable to this attack; SSH-based authentication remains secure. The Git project has chosen to consider this a vulnerability in Git, given the large amount of external software affected. The project has fixed the bug on its end by releasing updates for all supported versions that ban carriage returns in URLs entirely.
Affected software includes GitHub Desktop, Git LFS, and possibly other Git utilities:
Since Git itself doesn't use .lfsconfig file, specifying the URL that contains the newline character in .lfsconfig causes Git LFS to insert the newline character into the message, while bypassing [...] Git's validation.Earthstar is a privacy-oriented, offline-first, LGPL-licensed database intended to support distributed applications. Unlike other distributed storage libraries, it focuses on providing mutable data with human-meaningful names and modification times, which gives it an interface similar to many non-distributed key-value databases. Now, the developers are looking at switching to a new synchronization protocol — one that is general enough that it might see wider adoption.
Ubuntu will be moving its "official realtime communications channels" from IRC to Matrix, beginning March 1, 2025, following a discussion on the ubuntu-devel mailing list.
"Official" communication, such as making realtime requests of privileged Ubuntu developer teams, could be expected to be actioned if requested on Matrix only. Similarly, you can consider your social responsibility to other developers in relation to your work in Ubuntu development to be fulfilled if you are present on that platform. And Canonical will follow in its requirement for its employed Ubuntu developers to be present on that agreed platform during their working hours.