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OMG! Ubuntu

Firefoxโ€™s free VPN rollout finally reached me โ€“ is it any good though?

Firefox recently added a free built-in VPN to its desktop browser, but access to the feature is rolling out gradually. I got the prompt on my Ubuntu machine last night, so hereโ€™s a rundown of what it actually does, what it doesnโ€™t, and how to set it โ€“ assuming you have it. If youโ€™re waiting for it to roll out to you, thereโ€™s no special update or download to look out for as this is a progressive rollout feature โ€“ Mozilla enables it remotely, in stages. There was no fanfare when it arrived for me, the toolbar button just appeared. [โ€ฆ]

LWN.net

Introducing the FreeBSD laptop integration testing project

Recently, the FreeBSD Foundation has been making progress on improving the operating system's support for modern laptop hardware. The foundation is now looking to expand testing to encompass a wider range of hardware; it has announced a laptop integration testing project to allow the community to easily test FreeBSD's compatibility with laptops and submit the results. With limited access to testing systems, there's only so much we can do! We hope to work together with volunteers from the community who want FreeBSD to work well on their laptops. While we expect device hardware and software enumeration to be a fully automated process, we feel that manually-submitted comments about personal experience with FreeBSD are equally valuable. We plan to highlight this commentary on our "matrix of compatibility" webpage for each tested laptop. We are striving to make it as easy as possible to submit your results. You won't have to worry about environment setup, submission formatting, or any repo-

Phoronix

FreeBSD Aims To Better Track Laptop Hardware That Works Or Doesn't For Their OS

Over the past year the FreeBSD project has been making much progress on making it more viable to run this BSD operating system on laptop hardware. They have worked on better graphics driver support, improved power management / suspend, making sure audio is working, and even rolling out a KDE desktop option from the FreeBSD OS installer to ease the deployment on desktops. While that engineering work continues, they are also working now to make it easier to summarize laptop hardware working or not on FreeBSD...

LWN.net

[$] Protecting against TPM interposer attacks

The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a widely misunderstood piece of hardware (or firmware) that lives in most x86-based computers. At SCALE 23x in Pasadena, California, James Bottomley gave a presentation on the TPM and the work that he and others have done to enable the Linux kernel to work with it. In particular, he described the problems with interposer attacks, which target the communication between the TPM and the kernel, and what has been added to the kernel to thwart them.

LWN.net

6.6.133 stable kernel released

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.6.133 stable kernel. This reverts a backporting mistake that removed file descriptor checks which led to kernel panics if the fgetxattr, flistxattr, fremovexattr, or fsetxattr functions were called from user space with a file descriptor that did not reference an open file.

LWN.net

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (freerdp, grafana, grafana-pcp, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, and gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free, kernel, libpng12, libpng15, perl-YAML-Syck, python3, and rsync), Debian (dovecot, libxml-parser-perl, pyasn1, python-tornado, roundcube, tor, trafficserver, and valkey), Fedora (bind9-next, chromium, cmake, domoticz, freerdp, giflib, gst-devtools, gst-editing-services, gstreamer1, gstreamer1-doc, gstreamer1-plugin-libav, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free, gstreamer1-rtsp-server, gstreamer1-vaapi, libgsasl, libinput, libopenmpt, mapserver, mingw-binutils, mingw-gstreamer1, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-base, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-good, mingw-libpng, mingw-python3, nginx-mod-modsecurity, openbao, python-gstreamer1, python3.12, python3.13, python3.14, python3.9, rust, rust-sccache, tcpflow, and