I’ve noticed various reports that Fedora has decided to switch to Wayland by default in Fedora 25. It’s true that the alpha release will default to Wayland, but these reports have misunderstood an authorization from FESCo to proceed with the change as a final decision. This authorization corrects a bureaucratic mistake: FESCo previously authorized the …
Category Archives: Fedora
Positive progress on WebKitGTK+ security updates
I previously reported that, although WebKitGTK+ releases regular upstream security updates, most Linux distributions are not taking the updates. At the time, only Arch Linux and Fedora were reliably releasing our security updates. So I’m quite pleased that openSUSE recently released a WebKitGTK+ security update, and then Mageia did too. Gentoo currently has an update …
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Do you trust this package?
Your distribution’s package manager probably uses GPG signature checking to provide an extremely strong guarantee that the software packages you download have not been maliciously modified by a man in the middle (MITM) attacker when traveling over the Internet from your distribution to you. Smaller distros might have no such infrastructure in place (these distros …
Do you trust this application?
Much of the software you use is riddled with security vulnerabilities. Anyone who reads Matthew Garrett knows that most proprietary software is a lost cause. Some Linux advocates claim that free software is more secure than proprietary software, but it’s an open secret that tons of popular desktop Linux applications have many known, unfixed vulnerabilities. I rarely …
Do you trust this website?
TLS certificate validation errors are much less common on today’s Internet than they used to be, but you can still expect to run into them from time to time. Thanks to a decade of poor user interface decisions by web browsers (only very recently fixed in major browsers), users do not understand TLS and think it’s OK …
On WebKit Security Updates
Linux distributions have a problem with WebKit security. Major desktop browsers push automatic security updates directly to users on a regular basis, so most users don’t have to worry about security updates. But Linux users are dependent on their distributions to release updates. Apple fixed over 100 vulnerabilities in WebKit last year, so getting updates …
On Boot Times
Why does it take as long to boot Fedora 23 in 2016 as it did to boot Windows 95 in 1995? I knew we were slow, but I did not realize how slow: $ systemd-analyze Startup finished in 9.002s (firmware) + 5.586s (loader) + 781ms (kernel) + 24.845s (initrd) + 1min 16.803s (userspace) = 1min …
redhat.corpmerchandise.com is fixed
redhat.corpmerchandise.com is no longer broken. That’s a relatively good reaction time to the problem. Unfortunately, I’ve seen no talk of change in NSS to prevent sites from making similar mistakes in the future, and they are out of medium Fedora T-shirts.
Mozilla is responsible for the redhat.corpmerchandise.com fiasco
First of all, I should probably admit that, despite the title of this post, no, the redhat.corpmerchandise.com fiasco is not Mozilla’s fault: it’s Red Hat’s, because obviously Mozilla has no control over that domain. But that wouldn’t make for a very interesting title for a blog post, and Mozilla set the stage for this to …
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