In December 2025, Canonical announced a plan to develop a universal Public Key Infrastructure called upki. Jon Seager has published an update about the project with instructions on trying it out. In the few weeks since we announced upki, the core revocation engine has been established and is now functional, the CRLite mirroring tool is working and a production deployment in Canonical's datacentres is ongoing. We're now preparing for an alpha release and remain on track for an opt-in preview for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.
The curl project has found AI-powered tools to be a mixed bag when it comes to security reports. At FOSDEM 2026, curl creator and lead developer Daniel Stenberg used his keynote session to discuss his experience receiving a slew of low-quality reports and, at the same time, realizing that large language model (LLM) tools can sometimes find flaws that other tools have missed.
Greg-Kroah Hartman has released the 6.19.2, 6.18.12, 6.12.73, and 6.6.126 stable kernels. These kernels each contain a single change; Kroah-Hartman has reverted one problematic commit that prevents some systems from booting. "If the last stable release worked just fine, no need to upgrade."
At the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo, Stephen Brennan gave a presentation on the debuginfo format, which contains the symbols and other information needed for debugging, along with some alternatives. Debuginfo files are large and, he believes, are a bit scary to customers because of the "debug" in their name. By rethinking debuginfo and the tools that use it, he hopes that free-software developers "can add new, interesting capabilities to tools that we are already using or build new interesting tools".
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.19.1, 6.18.11, 6.12.72, and 6.6.125 stable kernels. As always, each contains important fixes throughout the tree; users of these kernels are advised to upgrade.
Version 9.2 of the Vim text editor has been released. "Vim 9.2 brings significant enhancements to the Vim9 scripting language, improved diff mode, comprehensive completion features, and platform-specific improvements including experimental Wayland support." Also included is a new interactive tutor mode.
Debian Project Leader (DPL) Andreas Tille has announced a new delegation for Debian's data projection team: Following the end of the previous delegation, Debian was left without an active Data Protection team. This situation has understandably drawn external attention and highlighted the importance of having a clearly identified point of contact for data protection matters within the project. I am therefore very pleased to announce that new volunteers have stepped forward, allowing us to re-establish the Debian Data Protection team with a fresh delegation. Tille had put out a call for volunteers in January after all previous members of the team had stepped down. He has appointed Aigars Mahinovs, Andrew M.A. Cater, Bart Martens, Emmanuel Arias, Gunnar Wolf, Kiran S Kunjumon, and Salvo Tomaselli as the new members of the team. The team provides a central coordination and advisory function around Debian's data handling, retention, dealing with deletion requests, and more.
The merge window for Linux 7.0 has opened, and with it comes a number of interesting improvements and enhancements. At the time of writing, there have been 7,695 non-merge commits accepted. The 7.0 release is not special, according to the kernel's versioning scheme — just the release that comes after 6.19. Humans love symbolism and round numbers, though, so it may feel like something of a milestone.
At FOSDEM 2026 Petya Kangalova, a senior tech partnership and engagement manager for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) spoke about how the project helps people map their surroundings to assist in disaster response and humanitarian aid. The project has developed a stack of technology to help volunteers collectively map an area and add in local knowledge metadata. "One of the core things that we believe is that when we speak about disaster response or people having access to data is that they really need accessible technology that's free and open for anyone to use."
Web sites are being increasingly beset by AI scraperbots — a problem that we have written about before, and which has slowly ramped up to an occasional de-facto DDoS attack. This has not gone uncontested, however: web site operators from around the world have been working on inventive countermeasures. These solutions target the problem posed by scraperbots in different ways; iocaine, a MIT-licensed nonsense generator, is designed to make scraped text less useful by poisoning it with fake data. The hope is to make running scraperbots not economically viable, and thereby address the problem at its root instead of playing an eternal game of Whac-A-Mole.
Transient devices pose a special challenge for an operating-system kernel. They can disappear at any time, leaving behind kernel data structures that no longer refer to an existing device, but which may still be in use by unknown kernel code. Managing the resulting lifecycle issues has frustrated kernel developers for years. In September 2025, the revocable resource-management patch series from Tzung-Bi Shih appeared to offer a partial solution to this problem. Since then, though, other problems have arisen, and the planned merging of this series into the 7.0 release has been called off.
Reinhard Tartler of Debian's new DFSG, Licensing & New Packages Team, or simply "DFSG Team", has announced that the team is now operational and is deploying new tooling to improve the NEW queue experience for Debian developers and maintainers. Our primary and immediate goal is simple: get the queue down. We are currently settling in and refining our processes to ensure stability and consistency. While our focus right now is on clearing the backlog, our long-term vision is to enable all Debian Developers to meaningfully contribute to DFSG reviewing activities, distributing the workload and knowledge more effectively across the project. The announcement includes information on the new dashboard for packages in the NEW queue, the rationale for the new tooling, and an introduction to the members of the team.
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