Linux Action News 73

Google's Project Zero criticizes Linux distros, Firefox can now tell you when you get pwned, and the growing elephant in the room about Azure.

Plus a new release of our favorite non-distro, GPL revoking debunking, and Android turns 10.

Links:

• Android turns 10 — This was an era in which Android devices were responding to Apple, and not vice versa as we find today.
• Google's Project Zero criticises Linux distros for tardy kernel patches — Project Zero accuses Linux distributions of leaving users exposed to known kernel vulnerabilities for weeks.
• CVE-2018-17182 in Ubuntu — As of 2018-09-26, fixes for this issue are applied to all kernels uploaded to RELEASE-proposed today. and should be released around Monday, Oct 1, 2018.
• No, GPL can't be revoked — For anybody who has been concerned by the talk from a few outsiders about revoking GPL licensing, this new section in the Software Freedom Conservancy's copyleft guide is worth a read. Thus, anyone downstream of the contributor (which is anyone using the contributor’s code), has an irrevocable license from the contributor. A contributor may claim to revoke their grant, and subsequently sue for copyright infringement, but a court would likely find the revocation was ineffective and the downstream user had a valid license defense to a claim of infringement.
• KDE neon Rebased on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS — The KDE neon team is proud to announce the rebase of our packages onto Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver". We encourage all users to upgrade now. The installable ISOs and Docker images have also been updated to run on 18.04.
• At least half of Azure is running Linux — "it's about half now, but it varies on the day because a lot of these workloads are elastic, but sometimes slightly over half of Azure VMs are Linux." Microsoft later clarified, "about half Azure VMs are Linux."
• Firefox can now tell you when you get pwned — Mozilla is taking this a step further by also letting you sign up for alerts for when your accounts appear in any (known) breaches in the future.
• Mintcast needs new hosts — Rob and Isaac talk about ending their time doing the podcast and ask who would like to take over.
• Linux Academy Job Openings