News briefs for January 25, 2019.
Linux kernel 5.0-rc8 was released[1] yesterday. Linus writes "This may be totally unnecessary, but we actually had more patches come in this last week than we had for rc7, which just didn't make me feel the warm and fuzzies. And while none of the patches looked all that scary, some of them were to pretty core files, so it wasn't all just random rare drivers (although those kinds also existed). So I agonized about it a bit, and then decided to just say 'no hurry' and make an rc8. And after I had tagged the rc, I noticed a patch in my inbox that I had missed that was a regression from one of the very patches this last week, so that made me feel like rc8 was the right decision."
Git v2.21.0 is now available[2]. New features include human-readable dates, detecting case-insensitive path collisions, multi-pack indexes, delta islands and more. See the GitHub Blog[3] for details on the new features.
1-terabyte microSD cards are now available. The Verge reports[4] that Micron[5] and Western Digital's SandDisk[6] both announced UHS-I microSDXC products at Mobile World Congress. The SanDisk card will be available in April for $449.00. No information yet on the pricing or availability of the Micron card.
Also at Mobile World Congress, Sprint announced it will be launching 5G service in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and Kansas City in May 2019, and then in Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Phoenix or Washington D.C. by the end of June 2019. See the TechCrunch post[7] for more info on the 5G coverage.
An unplanned point release for Ubuntu 16.04.6 is in the works. According to the release announcement[8], "In the light of the recently discovered and fixed apt vulnerability, we have decided