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Linus Torvalds has railed frequently and loudly against kernel developers breaking user space. But that rule is not ironclad; there are exceptions. The story of how a kernel change caused a GlusterFS breakage shows that there are sometimes unfortunate twists to those exceptions.

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Python core developer Raymond Hettinger's PyCon 2013 keynote had elements of a revival meeting sermon, but it was also meant to spread the "religion" well beyond those inside the meeting tent. Hettinger specifically tasked attendees to use his "What makes Python awesome?" talk as a sales tool with management and other Python skeptics. Subscribers can get the full coverage of the talk from this week's edition at the link below.

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The world was a simpler place when the TCP/IP network protocol suite was first designed. The net was slow and primitive and it was often a triumph to get a connection to a far-away host at all. The machines at either end of a TCP session normally did not have to concern themselves with how that connection was made; such details were left to routers. As a result, TCP is built around the notion of a (single) connection between two hosts. The Multipath TCP (MPTCP) project looks to change that view of networking by adding support for multiple transport paths to the endpoints; it offers a lot of benefits, but designing a deployable protocol for today's Internet is surprisingly hard.

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An exploit posted on March 13 revealed a rather easily exploitable security vulnerability (CVE 2013-1858) in the implementation of user namespaces. That exploit enables an unprivileged user to escalate to full root privileges. Although a fix was quickly provided, it is nevertheless instructive to look in some detail at the vulnerability, both to better understand the nature of this kind of exploit and also to briefly consider how this vulnerability came to appear inside the user namespaces implementation.

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Many pixels have been expended in the discussion of contributor agreements that transfer copyright from developers to a company or foundation. But, for developers in many projects, the discussion is moot, in that the requirement for an agreement exists and the papers must be signed before contributions to the project can be made. But, even then, there are some interesting details that merit attention. A recent discussion regarding one developer's contributions to the Emacs Org mode project shows how expansive and poorly understood such agreements can be in some cases.

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A February linux-kernel mailing list discussion of a patch that extends the use of the CAP_COMPROMISE_KERNEL capability soon evolved into a discussion of the specific uses (or abuses) of the CAP_SYS_RAWIO capability within the kernel. However, in reality, the discussion once again exposes some general difficulties in the Linux capabilities implementation—difficulties that seem to have no easy solution.

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Many people have talked about the Android kernel code and its relation to the mainline. One of the people who has done the most to help bring Android and the mainline closer together is John Stultz; at the 2013 Linaro Connect Asia event, he talked about the status of the Android code. The picture that emerged shows that a lot of progress has been made, but there is still a lot of work yet to be done. Click below (subscribers only) for the full report.

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Ubuntu publicly announced its plan for the future of its Unity graphical shell on March 4, a plan that includes a new compositing window manager designed to run on the distribution's device platforms as well as on desktop systems. The plan will reimplement the Unity shell in Qt and replace Compiz with a new display stack called Mir that will incorporate a compositor, input manager, and several other pieces. Mir is not designed to use the Wayland display protocol (although the Ubuntu specification suggests it could be added later), a decision that raised the ire of developers in several other projects.

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In this article, we continue last week's discussion of user namespaces. In particular, we look in more detail at the interaction of user namespaces and capabilities as well as the combination of user namespaces with other types of namespaces.

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By the time that Linus released the 3.9-rc1 kernel prepatch and closed the merge window for this cycle, he had pulled a total of 10,265 non-merge changesets into the mainline repository. That is just over 2,000 changes since last week's summary. Subscribers can click below for a look at the last merges for 3.9.

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Current news

The GNOME 3.8 release is out. "The exciting new features and improvements in this release include a integrated application search, privacy and sharing settings, notification filtering, a new classic mode, OwnCloud integration, previews of clocks, notes, photos and weather applications, and many more." See the release notes for details.

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Ben Hutchings has released stable kernel 3.2.42 with important fixes throughout the tree.

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CentOS has updated perl (C6; C5: multiple vulnerabilities).

Debian has updated icinga (code execution).

openSUSE has updated pigz (information disclosure).

Oracle has updated perl (OL6; OL5: multiple vulnerabilities).

Red Hat has updated perl (multiple vulnerabilities).

Scientific Linux has updated perl (multiple vulnerabilities).

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Matthew Garrett asserts that people attacking UEFI secure boot are aiming at the wrong target. "Those who argue against Secure Boot risk depriving us of the freedom to make a personal decision as to who we trust. Those who argue against Secure Boot while ignoring Restricted Boot risk depriving us of even more. The traditional PC market is decreasing in importance. Unless we do anything about it, free software will be limited to a niche group of enthusiasts who've carefully chosen from a small set of devices that respect user freedom. We should have been campaigning against Restricted Boot 10 years ago. Don't delay it even further by fighting against implementations that already respect user freedom."

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Over at the grsecurity blog, Brad Spengler and the PaX Team have co-written a lengthy look at kernel address space layout randomization (KASLR) and its failures. "KASLR is an easy to understand metaphor. Even non-technical users can make sense of the concept of a moving target being harder to attack. But in this obsession with an acronym outside of any context and consideration of its limitations, we lose sight of the fact that this moving target only moves once and is pretty easy to spot. We forget that the appeal of ASLR was in its cost/benefit ratio, not because of its high benefit, but because of its low cost."

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The Spanish association Hispalinux has filed a complaint against Microsoft to the European Commission, Reuters reports. "In its 14-page complaint, Hispalinux said Windows 8 contained an "obstruction mechanism" called UEFI Secure Boot that controls the start-up of the computer and means users must seek keys from Microsoft to install another operating system. The group said it was "a de facto technological jail for computer booting systems ... making Microsoft's Windows platform less neutral than ever"." (Thanks to Pat Read)

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The H has an extensive survey of available RSS reader applications, both open source and proprietary. "ownCloud is a complete self-hosted service platform that provides file sharing and collaboration features including calendaring, to do lists, a document viewer, and integration with Active Directory and LDAP. The software also includes a feed reader application, which started as a Google Summer of Code effort and takes many design cues from Google Reader."

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CentOS has updated axis (C5: incorrect certificate validation).

Debian has updated libxml2 (denial of service).

openSUSE has updated imagemagick (code execution) and graphicsmagick (denial of service).

Oracle has updated axis (OL5: incorrect certificate validation).

Red Hat has updated axis (RHEL5: incorrect certificate validation).

Scientific Linux has updated axis (SL5: incorrect certificate validation).

Ubuntu has updated ruby (denial of service) and OMAP4 kernel (12.04 LTS: multiple vulnerabilities).

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GTK+ 3.8.0 has been released. This version includes support for Wayland 1.0, and contains many new features and performance improvements.

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Fedora has updated krb5 (F18: denial of service), euca2ools (F18; F17: insecure snapshots), kernel (F18: multiple vulnerabilities), mimetex (F18; F17: multiple vulnerabilities), and tor (F17: denial of service).

openSUSE has updated nss-pam-ldapd (12.2, 12.1; 12.3; 11.4: code execution) and krb5 (11.4: denial of service).

Scientific Linux has updated OpenIPMI (privilege escalation).

Slackware has updated php (multiple vulnerabilities).

SUSE has updated samba (multiple vulnerabilities in SWAT).

Ubuntu has updated kernel (10.04 LTS: multiple vulnerabilities), EC2 kernel (10.04 LTS: multiple vulnerabilities), OMAP4 kernel (11.10: multiple vulnerabilities), openssl (multiple vulnerabilities), and gnome-online-accounts (information disclosure).

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