The Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA is great for quickly and easily fetching new upstream Linux kernel builds assembled for Ubuntu/Debian systems. It's a big time saver for grabbing the latest stable or daily development kernel on Ubuntu. It's also great for having them publicly and readily available -- one of the reasons I prefer it as well is for that transparency into the kernel builds and prefer using them so when a vendor or user asks about my kernel configuration or if I can supply the kernel used for testing, it's darn simple to just cite the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA.

But it hasn't been producing any new kernel builds since the middle of September... All of the Linux 6.12 release candidates and daily builds have not been producing. Presumably due to a broken Kconfig change or something else failing from the Linux 6.12 merge window changes.

Similar to last year the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA being broken for over a month. Frustrating that such a useful feature and one maintained by the Ubuntu Kernel Team can remain broken for weeks on end. It's been an annoyance on my end for a number of weeks, but at least last time when calling out the broken state for more than a month, it wound up being fixed shortly thereafter. Hopefully that happens again to restore this great feature of Ubuntu Linux particularly for hardware enthusiasts, kernel testers, etc.

Whether you just downloaded Firefox, or you’ve been with us since the beginning, you are a vital part of helping us make the internet a better place. Here's a sneak peak at what's coming next!

Community driven applications and extensions written to extend the power of the COSMIC™ Desktop made by System 76.

COSMIC Utils Projects are all open source and as such welcome the spirit of open collaboration. Head over to the source code of any of the projects listed above and help however you feel necessary!

This is a collection of third party utilities designed for COSMIC. The organization is open to welcoming new projects and contributors.

Runescape has been a game near and dear to my heart since I was a child. Though I do not actively play anymore, it still functions as an interesting programming project substrate. Most recently, I created a bot that automatically executes trades on the Grand Exchange in order to conduct market making via common machine learning techniques. This blog post will explain the individual components of the bot, the various trading algorithms used, and the results of an experiment comparing the various trading algorithms' performance.

A while back COSMIC entered its Alpha 1 and then Alpha 2 and now we have the CEO of System76 Carl Richell back on the show to talk about the project.

One notable comment (around minute 49) by Carl is that there will "soon" be a development option available for Pop!_OS 22.04 users to upgrade to 24.04 where some GNOME applications will be replaced by their COSMIC equivalents.

Also, Carl says he hopes Beta 1 will be released in January 2025. Until then, there will be a new Alpha every last Thursday of the month.

If you love exploit mitigations, you may have heard of a new system call named mseal landing into the Linux kernel’s 6.10 release, providing a protection called “memory sealing.” Beyond notes from the authors, very little information about this mitigation exists. In this blog post, we’ll explain what this syscall is, including how it’s different from prior memory protection schemes and how it works in the kernel to protect virtual memory. We’ll also describe the particular exploit scenarios that mseal helps stop in Linux userspace, such as stopping malicious permissions tampering and preventing memory unmapping attacks.

Memory sealing allows developers to make memory regions immutable from illicit modifications during program runtime. When a virtual memory address (VMA) range is sealed, an attacker with a code execution primitive cannot perform subsequent virtual memory operations to change the VMA’s permissions or modify how it is laid out for their benefit.

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mseal digresses from prior memory protection schemes on Linux because it is a syscall tailored specifically for exploit mitigation against remote attackers seeking code execution rather than potentially local ones looking to exfiltrate sensitive secrets in-memory.

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From the disallowed operations, we can discern two particular exploit scenarios that memory sealing will prevent:

• Tampering with a VMA’s permissions. Notably, not allowing executable permissions to be set can stop the revival of shellcode-based attacks.
• “Hole-punching” through arbitrary unmapping/remapping of a memory region, mitigating data-only exploits that take advantage of refilling memory regions with attacker-controlled data.

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There are likely many other use cases and scenarios that we didn’t cover. After all, mseal is the newest kid on the block in the Linux kernel! As the glibc integration completes and matures, we expect to see improved iterations for the syscall to meet particular demands, including fleshing out the ultimate use of the flags parameter.

Drivers passing through San Francisco have a new roadside distraction to consider: billboards calling out businesses that don't cough up for the open source code that they use.

The signs are the work of the Open Source Pledge – a group that launched earlier this month. It asks businesses that make use of open source code to pledge $2,000 per developer to support projects that develop the code. So far, 25 companies have signed up – but project co-founder Chad Whitacre wants bigger firms to pay their dues, too.

Over the past 3 years the pace of development in APS has steadily fallen off as maintainers including myself have moved on to other things. I no longer have time and motivation to dedicate to this project, and in the absence of significant external contributions there is no-one else I can offer the project's stewardship to.

To that effect, I will be archiving the repository on Monday, October 14th 2024 at 7AM GST. In the situation that a serious and viable fork emerges, I will help them as much as I can with the transition. The criteria for what counts as "serious and viable" is entirely vibes-driven for now, and may become more specific in the future. In case I determine that a fork does not live up to my made up standard, they will have to come up with a slightly more creative name than "Android Password Store" and watch low 4 figures of cash wither away in OpenCollective's bank account.

Hi everyone I’m happy to announce the new 2024 Ubuntu Community Council!

• Heather Ellsworth (~hellsworth1) @hellsworth1
• Scarlett Moore (~scarlettmoore) @scarlettmoore
• Nathan Haines (~nhaines) @nhaines
• José Antonio Rey (~jose) @jose
• Thomas Ward (~teward) @teward
• Merlijn Sebrechts (~merlijn-sebrechts) @merlijn-sebrechts
• Aaron Rainbolt (~arraybolt3) @arraybolt3 They are all elected for a period of two years.

Pull request #10974 introduces the @bitwarden/sdk-internal dependency which is needed to build the desktop client. The dependency contains a licence statement which contains the following clause:

You may not use this SDK to develop applications for use with software other than Bitwarden (including non-compatible implementations of Bitwarden) or to develop another SDK.

This violates freedom 0.

It is not possible to build desktop-v2024.10.0 (or, likely, current master) without removing this dependency.

We are excited to announce the launch of a dedicated fund aimed at providing financial assistance to Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FOSS/FLOSS) projects globally, with an annual commitment of $1 million. I will use the FOSS acronym in this post hereafter.

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For us, FLOSS/fund is about hacker goodwill, reciprocity, and common sense business strategy. We invite you to apply for funding. If you would like to understand the motivations behind this, a bit of storytelling lies ahead.

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To initiate and give this experiment a serious shot, FLOSS/fund will accept funding requests from projects through a publicly accessible funding.json file hosted on their respositories or websites. This file is not meant to convey everything there is to know—an impossible task—but to solicit interest and communicate enough to ensure discoverability which would not be possible otherwise. Refer to the funding.json docs to know more.

Applications that come through to the FLOSS/fund will be indexed and published on the dir.floss.fund directory / portal, making them publicly discoverable by anyone interested in supporting projects. This is going to be an interesting experiment. Fingers crossed!

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 861 for the week of October 6 - 12, 2024.

• Canonical Releases Ubuntu 24.10 Oracular Oriole
• Ubuntu Stats
• Hot in Support
• Ubuntu Meeting Activity Reports
• LXD: Weekly news #366
• Rocks Public Journal 2024-10-11
• Ubuntu HPC Meeting Notes: 2024/10/9
• Ubuntu 24.10 Release Party @ Pohang
• Ubuntu 24.10 Release & 20th Anniversary Event @ Busan
• LoCo Events
• Introducing the NVMe/TCP PoC with Ubuntu Server 24.10
• Expanding the Xubuntu Community: Matrix & Discourse
• ...
• Updates and Security for Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, 24.04, and 24.10
• And much more!