News briefs for February 19, 2019.
Google rethinks its planned changes to Chrome's extension API that would have broken many ad-blocking extensions. Ars Technica[1] reports that Google has made this revision to "ensure that the current variety of content-blocking extensions is preserved". In addition, "Google maintains that 'It is not, nor has it ever been, our goal to prevent or break content blocking' [emphasis Google's] and says that it will work to update its proposal to address the capability gaps and pain points."
Kali Linux 2019.1 was released yesterday[2]. This is the first release of 2019, bringing the kernel to version 4.19.13. This release fixes many bugs and includes several updated packages. The release announcement notes that "the big marquee update of this release is the update of Metasploit to version 5.0, which is their first major release since version 4.0 came out in 2011." You can download Kali Linux from here[3].
A new version of the Cutelyst Qt/C++ Web Framework is now available. According to Dantti's Blog[4], Cutelyst 2.7.0 brings back proper async support and includes a few other new features.
Ubuntu posted a security notice of a new systemd vulnerability yesterday. USN-3891-1[5] affects the following versions of Ubuntu and its derivatives: Ubuntu 18.10, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The details: "systemd incorrectly handled certain D-Bus messages. A local unprivileged attacker could exploit this in order to crash the init process, resulting in a system denial-of-service (kernel panic)." See the security notice[6] for instructions on how to update.
Applications for the Outreachy Summer 2019 round of internships is open now to April 2, 2019. The program "provides three-month internships to work in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Interns are paid a stipend of $5,500 and have a $500 travel stipend available