Just my blogroll - BlogFlock

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 26, 2026 - LWN.net

2026-02-26T00:20:26.000Z

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

Front: New flags for clone3(); Discord replacements; virtual swap spaces; BPF memory protection keys; PostgreSQL's lessons in attracting contributors; 7.0 merge window; Network Time Security.
Briefs: OpenSUSE governance; Firefox 148.0; GNU Awk 5.4.0; GNU Octave 11.1.0; Rust in Ladybird; LibreOffice Online; Weston 15.0; RIP Robert Kaye; Quotes; ...
Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Support period lengthened for the 6.6, 6.12, and 6.18 kernels - LWN.net

2026-02-25T19:43:04.000Z

The stated support periods for the 6.6, 6.12, and 6.18 kernels has been extended. The 6.6 kernel will be supported with stable updates through the end of 2027 (for four years of support total), while 6.12 and 6.18 will get updates through the end of 2028, for four and three years of support.

My Fellow Americans, We Are Richer Than Ever Before. Well, You Aren’t, but We Are - McSweeney’s

2026-02-25T19:00:00.000Z

“My fellow Americans, our nation is back—bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before.” — Donald Trump during his State of the Union

- - -

My fellow Americans, I stand before you tonight to make one thing very clear: we are richer than ever before. You aren’t, of course. But we are. My friends and I are just, like, incredibly rich and only gonna get even richer. So. That’s basically my announcement.

My fellow Americans, despite what everyone else says, we are living in the golden age of America. Not your golden age, though. My golden age. As in: I am very old, and everything I own is either solid gold or gold-plated or painted in gold to make it seem like it’s real gold.

My fellow Americans, the stock market has skyrocketed since I took back the office. It’s been very lucrative for us. Not for you, obviously. Because you didn’t know when things would go up and down. But it’s been very lucrative for us, because we get to decide when things go up and down.

My fellow Americans, when I last spoke to this chamber twelve months ago, I had inherited a country that was on the brink of economic collapse under the weight of all the jobs it kept adding. Too many jobs and you’ll collapse, folks. That’s why we’re getting rid of jobs. No more jobs. Why? Because jobs have to pay people, and that costs money. Instead, we’re gonna do a thing called “AI Does It.” Here’s how it works: Is it your job? AI does it now.

My fellow Americans, we’re no longer going to have to pay taxes. You will, still. You’ll have to pay a lot of taxes, actually. But not me and my guys. We’re done with taxes. We beat taxes. Taxes lost very badly, and now we don’t have to deal with them—you do.

My fellow Americans, we’re bringing money back to our country. We’re using a thing called tariffs. Here’s how it works: You have to pay more for things, and that money becomes the people’s money. (The people are my family and me.)

My fellow Americans, we are going to get even richer over the next three to twelve years of my presidency. And when I saw “we,” I’m using the royal we. You understand? Not the grammar thing. The king thing.

My fellow Americans, we’re going to be able to afford a home. Not you—you will never own a home. But we will own many homes. Each of us will own a whole bunch of great big homes, so many that a lot of them will just be empty. That’s our American Dream. Not your dream, clearly. Our dream.

My fellow Americans, a short time ago, we were a dead country. Now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. The hottest, and getting hotter and hotter until it’s too hot to live here anymore. For you, of course. Too hot for you. I’ve got a great, ice-cold bunker. The best bunker ever. I guess this one isn’t about money. It should be. So, the bunkers are also absolutely covered in gold.

The mysterious Assassin's Creed Hexe has a new creative director, claims report, as Ubisoft say goodbye to the legendary Clint Hocking - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-25T17:13:01.000Z

Ubisoft's latest bout of executive musical chairs continues with a report that Clint Hocking, creative director of Far Cry 2, Watch Dogs Legion, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and the forthcoming Assassin’s Creed Codename Hexe, has left the company.

We have Very Gary Computing to thank for this bit of scuttlebutt. Apparently, Hocking's departure was communicated to staff this week by Assassin’s Creed’s new leadership team. Jean Guesdon, the brand’s just-appointed head of content, will take over as creative director for Hexe.

Put some FEAR in your STALKER 2 with the debris-flinging CinematicFX mod - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-25T17:09:45.000Z

I’ve long thought of STALKER 2’s gunplay as an underappreciated component of the eerie survival shooter. It’ll never top anyone’s FPS all-timer list but its shootsticks are thunderously bangy, handling with both weight and smoothness, and your own barely-there mortality usually flavours encounters with a delicious high-stakes tension.

The only shortcoming is a lack of visual drama, but that can now be addressed with Cazanu’s new CinematicFX mod: where missed bullets hitting innocent masonry would previously amount to an understated thunk, scenery impacts now throw up vast clouds of dust, smoke, and debris. Cinematic effects, indeed.

Four years after the last one, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2's enhanced editions have a new patch out in Steam beta - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-25T17:09:35.000Z

Gather round, lovers of classic RPGs. The enhanced editions of the first two Baldur's Gate game, plus Icewind Dale and BG expansion Siege of Dragonspear, have gotten their first patch since 2021. Well, I say gotten, patch 2.7 is only out in Steam beta for now - it'll hit GOG too further down the line.

Open source graphics drivers Mesa 26.0.1 released with various bug fixes and a security fix - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-02-25T16:49:19.000Z

Developer Eric Engestrom announced the Mesa 26.0.1 update for open source graphics drivers, the first set of bug-fixes for the latest release.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Recovering Helldivers 2 players should check out the cowboy robot gunplay of Far Far West, which has a demo - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-25T16:23:36.000Z

If you’ve been holding off playing Helldivers 2 because you’re fervently hoping they’ll eventually add robot cowboy wizards, then firstly, you are eccentric to the point of deranged, and your mother and I are very worried about you, and secondly, why not play the Far Far West demo instead? It’s a one to four player co-op FPS with robot cowboy wizards out the wazoo. Except that robots don’t have wazoos, I think.

[$] No hardware memory isolation for BPF programs - LWN.net

2026-02-25T15:27:45.000Z

On February 12, Yeoreum Yun posted a suggestion for an improvement to the security of the kernel's BPF implementation: use memory protection keys to prevent unauthorized access to memory by BPF programs. Yun wanted to put the topic on the list for discussion at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit in May, but the lack of engagement makes that unlikely. They also have a patch set implementing some of the proposed changes, but has not yet shared that with the mailing list. Yun's proposal does not seem likely to be accepted in its current form, but the kernel has added hardware-based hardening options in the past, sometimes after substantial discussion.

Dark Sky Redux - Irreal

2026-02-25T15:22:17.000Z

I have to admit to being a bit of a weather nerd. Florida, of course, has very active weather—especially in the Summer—so some of my obsession is self preservation but I also follow the weather where family members reside and that doesn’t affect me directly. One of my favorite weather apps was Dark Sky, an independent app that specialized on localized weather reporting. It was eventually bought by Apple and integrated into Apple Weather.

Now the developers of Dark Sky have left Apple and started Acme Weather with the intention of producing an even better weather app. It has a lot of the features of Dark Sky but introduces what are essentially error bars into its forecasts. As they say, forecasts are never certain and they are attempting to indicate how accurate a given forecast is.

The new app is available for iOS in the app store but there are plans to port it to Android as well. I don’t remember if Dark Sky was available on Android but I welcome the plans to make the new app generally available.

I’m generally happy with Apple Weather and use it several times a day but I must admit to being tempted to try out. The yearly subscription is $25 with a two week trial period. I’ll probably give it a try because, as I say, I’m a weather nerd.

Blood-drunk shooter Ultrakill is back with a whole hellworld full of lies, portals and non-Euclidean spaces - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-25T15:02:45.000Z

Do you like architecture that plays tricks on you? Secret rooms in DOOM? The Ashtray Maze in Control? Thinking with Portals? The 5 a.m.? That painting of some books outside the lockers in the British Library that bends queasily as you approach, revealing itself to be a horrible wedge of tomeflesh, projecting outward into our realm like some dead author's imprisoned soul? I guess you’ll be playing the new Ultrakill update then.

It introduces the eighth layer of Hell, Fraud, in which nothing you perceive with your eyes can be trusted. A problematic prospect, for a “video” game. Here’s the trailer. I promise you that the play button below isn’t an illusion. Are you an illusion? Blink twice for "Yes".

Resident Evil Requiem review - a cathartic cross-breed of creeps and carnage - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-25T15:00:00.000Z

Resident Evil: Requiem is filled with winking reminders of previous games, so I was surprised the touchstone I kept coming back to was the one Capcom surely want me to forget: Resident Evil 6. The latter set out with bold aspirations. It took all the various reinventions the series had adopted throughout the years and spliced them into one giant hunk of Resident Evil meat, hoping it would mutate into a grisly hybrid that could channel all the styles of previous experiments. Sadly, the Resi 6 Golem also dined out on ideas from Call Of Duty and Michael Bay movies, creating more of a shallow frat bro than an ultimate life form. All these years later, Requiem feels like Capcom picking up the scalpel to take another crack at that ambitious goal.

It's pulled in various test subjects, but the core elements are the skin-crawling dread of Resident Evil 7 and the karate-kicking action of Resident Evil 4 Remake. On the whole, Requiem's Golem is a stronger hybrid than Resi 6. The initial six or so hours of its lifespan are a triumph, trapping me under the weight of its oppressive horror before letting me slip free to get sweet revenge in a flurry of hyper-violence. The game starts to disintegrate into messy chunks shortly after, but those opening few hours are absolutely worth letting this prototype out of the lab.

Brotato gets a DRM-free release on GOG - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-02-25T14:33:23.000Z

GOG fans can finally get in on the Brotato action, just keep in mind - it might suck away endless hours of your time if you're not careful.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

[$] An effort to secure the Network Time Protocol - LWN.net

2026-02-25T14:26:21.000Z

The Network Time Protocol (NTP) debuted in 1985; it is a universally used, open specification that is deeply important for all sorts of activities we take for granted. It also, despite a number of efforts, remains stubbornly unsecured. Ruben Nijveld presented work at FOSDEM 2026 to speed adoption of the thus-far largely ignored standard for securing NTP traffic: IETF's RFC-8915 that specifies Network Time Security (NTS) for NTP.

MetaBrainz mourns the loss of Robert Kaye - LWN.net

2026-02-25T14:22:16.000Z

The MetaBrainz Foundation has announced the unexpected passing of its founder and executive director, Robert Kaye:

Robert's vision and leadership shaped MetaBrainz and left a lasting mark on the music industry and open source movement. His contributions were significant and his loss is deeply felt across our global community.

The Board is actively overseeing a smooth leadership transition and has measures in place to ensure that MetaBrainz continues to operate without interruption. Further updates will be shared in due course.

Security updates for Wednesday - LWN.net

2026-02-25T14:08:37.000Z

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (grafana and grafana-pcp), Debian (gnutls28), Fedora (chromium and yt-dlp), Oracle (389-ds-base, kernel, munge, and openssl), Red Hat (buildah, containernetworking-plugins, opentelemetry-collector, podman, runc, and skopeo), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (chromium, cosign, firefox, freerdp, gimp, heroic-games-launcher, kernel, libopenssl-3-devel, libxml2, libxslt, mosquitto, openqa, os-autoinst, openqa-devel-container, openvswitch, phpunit, postgresql14, postgresql15, postgresql16, protobuf, python310, python311-PyPDF2, python36, snpguest, warewulf4, and weblate), and Ubuntu (curl, kernel, linux, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-oracle, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-gcp-fips, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-6.8, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-realtime, linux-raspi-realtime, linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8, and linux-xilinx).

Maura Quint’s State of the Union Recap - McSweeney’s

2026-02-25T14:02:00.000Z

State Of The Union
February 24, 2026
Washington, DC

8:52 PM: The State of the Union is opened by House Majority Leader Mike Johnson, who has been released from his medium-sized dog cage specially for this evening. He welcomes congressional attendees with a giggle, as this is the first time he’s been permitted to speak since late January. Standing on the dais beside him is Vice President and Fall Out Boy fanfic author JD Vance. While most Republicans have chosen red, Vance wears a blue tie to complement Peter Thiel’s eyes.

9:10 PM: Having just styled his hair by rubbing it against a balloon, President Trump enters the House Chamber in the building formerly known as the US Capitol and now known as the “Cypto.com Funzone.” Republicans in the audience give him a standing ovation. Trump, reading from his teleprompter, declares, “Our nation is back—bigger, better, stronger, and richer than ever before.” The audience stands and claps louder as White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles holds an “Applause-o-Meter,” which grants additional presidential pardons to the most enthusiastic audience members.

TRUMP CLAIMS: “This is the golden age of America.”

FACT CHECK: As of publication, this is unfortunately untrue, as Donald Trump is still alive.

9:16 PM: Texas Representative Al Green holds up a handwritten sign that reads BLACK PEOPLE AREN’T APES!, referring to racist videos that Trump has shared about President Obama. Republicans shout “USA!” and force him to leave as RFK Jr. attempts to redirect the crowd by ripping off his shirt and doing a line of coke off of an oddly dirty toilet seat he seems to have brought himself. He demands that everyone around him lick the toilet seat. Kristi Noem pulls a small dog out of her purse, giggles, and snaps its neck.

9:22 PM: As anticipated, Trump focuses on immigration. “We have the strongest border in American history by far,” he claims. The crowd of Marvel villains applauds. “In the past several months, zero illegal aliens have been admitted to the United States unless they were escorted by, or delivered to, a Republican congressman as a sex slave.”

TRUMP CLAIMS: “I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe.”

FACT CHECK: This is one of the fun lies where you have to enter Satan’s trash pit of degraded imagination even to begin to guess what Trump’s talking about. Our best bet is that he likes the number 18 because he’s a fan of girls that age, and “trillion” sounds like a big number.

9:45 PM: The US Men’s Olympic Hockey Team is saluted by President Trump. He is clearly a fan of Icebreaker and Heated Rivalry, and gazes adoringly at his TBIdols. As rich, violent white men who are missing some teeth and likely have degenerative brain disease, they represent the Platonic ideal of a Trump supporter.

TRUMP CLAIMS: “A short time ago, we were a dead country. Now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world.”

FACT CHECK: Due to Trump’s recent deregulation of greenhouse gases, America will be a direct driver of global warming, but other countries, and not just the United States, will also likely get hotter as a result.

9:55 PM: Trump addresses the SCOTUS justices in attendance. “Unfortunate ruling from the Supreme Court, it just came down, it just came down,” he says. “JD, go do the thing. You know the thing.” Vance walks off the dais, pausing in front of a remarkably lifelike Amy Coney Barrett before pulling out a pocket knife and continuing to Brett Kavanaugh.

TRUMP CLAIMS: “Prices on everyday goods are falling.”

FACT CHECK: Prices on items such as groceries have risen sharply, but it is true that the cost to bribe an American president is the lowest it’s been in decades.

10:13 PM: Cocking his wobbly mass of ever-melting head, Trump says, “Somali pirates ransacked Minnesota. I talked to the ghost of an eighteenth-century plantation owner, and he said, ‘Sir. Sir, people think pirates are cool, but you’re much better than pirates. Please help my people and me so that we can be richer.‘” The president then instructs the audience to look under their seats. Everyone leans down and pulls out white robes. “That’s right, we have a little something, a gift, very comfortable, and they have hoods. Some people are calling it a ’Trump Robe,’ and they’re calling me a ‘Grand Wizard.’ I’m not calling myself that, if you can believe it, but they’re saying it, and I don’t know, maybe it will stick.” Mike Johnson smiles and nods.

TRUMP CLAIMS: “We have lifted a record 2.4 million Americans off of food stamps.”

FACT CHECK: This claim is true. It was achieved by eliminating necessary programs and letting people starve.

10:22 PM: Trump announces a new “War on Fraud” initiative to be led by Vance. The vice president squints as Trump says that he will begin by going after Maybelline, because “maybe she’s born with it,” but what about HIM?

TRUMP CLAIMS: “I took prescription drugs… from the highest price in the entire world to the lowest. That’s a big achievement. The result is price differences of 300 percent, 400 percent, 500 percent, 600 percent, and more.”

FACT CHECK: True. Drug companies now pay you to take their meds. While you can send them a bill, we advise simply robbing pharmaceutical execs directly.

10:34 PM: Republicans continue to bob up and down in deference to their diapered king while Democrats in attendance remained seated. Trump contorts his face into a wide, pained grimace that is meant to convey what he seems to think is a smile. “These people are crazy,” he says. “Democrats are destroying our country!” Pete Hegseth chugs half a bottle of tequila and yells “IN YOUR FACE” toward the Democratic half of the room, before vomiting onto Tulsi Gabbard.

TRUMP CLAIMS: “I love America.”

FACT CHECK: Trump has never once felt love.

10:37 PM: Trump continues, now all riled up, “Democrats are evil and shouldn’t be allowed to live. Speaking of, we must reject political violence of any kind. Look what happened to my best friend, Charlie Kirk. Well, we have a little surprise for you.” The taxidermied corpse of Charlie Kirk is dropped and swings from the rafters as red, white, and blue fireworks explode inside the room, raining down sparks and lighting one of the attending military generals on fire. Erika Kirk pretends to sniffle like a bad simulacrum of grief before holding up a QR code for viewers to donate to her Charlie Kirk Memorial Tiki Vacation Facelift Fund.

TRUMP CLAIMS: “We love religion, and we love bringing it back, and it’s coming back at levels that nobody thought possible.”

FACT CHECK: True. The number of middle-aged women taking up witchcraft to learn hexes has grown dramatically during Trump’s presidency. And, according to one God, the number of people praying for “it to happen” has nearly tripled in the last year alone.

10:43 PM: Trump continues introducing various guests and sharing their stories, including the “brave parents of a beautiful young girl,” likely referring to the courage it took them to bring their daughter to a room swarming with sex pests.

10:51 PM: Addressing a grieving mother, Trump continues, “I want to present you with an award for your bravery, and an expired coupon for a Big Mac. We love Big Macs, don’t we? The way the ketchup drips out of them when you take a bite, much like your horribly murdered daughter’s neck dripped blood. Probably the same color, blood, ketchup, awful, awful stuff, she screamed a lot, didn’t she? That’s right, point the camera at that mother there. What a sad thing. Your daughter screamed, huh… but you get to be here with me now so we know it didn’t all turn out too bad, did it.” Vance and Johnson stand and applaud.

11:08 PM: Nearly concluding this lengthy lie festival formerly known as the State of the Union, Trump introduces a WWII fighter pilot and awards him the Medal of Honor. “I’ve always wanted the Congressional Medal of Honor,” he says, "but they never give it to me. I keep killing people all the time, and yet they still don’t give it to me. We’ll change that in my third term.”

KDE Plasma 6.6.1 rolls out with lots of fixes for KWin - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2026-02-25T12:55:41.000Z

The KDE team have released the latest release for the Plasma desktop, with version 6.6.1 bringing quite a lot of bug fixing.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Amazon ditch publishing duties on ex-Forza Horizon devs' story-driven open-world racer - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-25T12:52:35.000Z

Amazon have released UK studio Maverick Games from a deal to publish the story-led open-world driving game the latter have been working on for a number of years. The split leaves Maverick, founded in 2022 by ex-Playground Games devs including Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown, looking for a new partner. Though, they say they're already in "active dialogue" with such folks.

“Sapkowski is a kleptomaniac with mythology” - How Reigns: The Witcher coaxes out the improv chaos of Geralt's universe - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2026-02-25T12:21:45.000Z

Reigns: The Witcher narrative designer Oscar Harrington-Shaw thinks Geralt of Rivia has a promising future as a private eye. “Another source of inspiration which I quite like leaning on, which the games do and the books do, is hard-boiled crime detective stories,” he tells me, when I ask whether his work on Nerial’s latest narrative card RPG has given him any wild notions for Witcher projects. “Geralt actually sort of lives in that world. So it could be cool to have like a spin-off neo noir crime detective film. Almost like Knives Out, even, but with Geralt as the detective.”

Just my blogroll - BlogFlock

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 26, 2026 - LWN.net

Support period lengthened for the 6.6, 6.12, and 6.18 kernels - LWN.net

My Fellow Americans, We Are Richer Than Ever Before. Well, You Aren’t, but We Are - McSweeney’s

The mysterious Assassin's Creed Hexe has a new creative director, claims report, as Ubisoft say goodbye to the legendary Clint Hocking - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

Put some FEAR in your STALKER 2 with the debris-flinging CinematicFX mod - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

Four years after the last one, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2's enhanced editions have a new patch out in Steam beta - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

Open source graphics drivers Mesa 26.0.1 released with various bug fixes and a security fix - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

Recovering Helldivers 2 players should check out the cowboy robot gunplay of Far Far West, which has a demo - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

[$] No hardware memory isolation for BPF programs - LWN.net

Dark Sky Redux - Irreal

Blood-drunk shooter Ultrakill is back with a whole hellworld full of lies, portals and non-Euclidean spaces - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

Resident Evil Requiem review - a cathartic cross-breed of creeps and carnage - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

Brotato gets a DRM-free release on GOG - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

[$] An effort to secure the Network Time Protocol - LWN.net

MetaBrainz mourns the loss of Robert Kaye - LWN.net

Security updates for Wednesday - LWN.net

Maura Quint’s State of the Union Recap - McSweeney’s

State Of The Union February 24, 2026 Washington, DC

KDE Plasma 6.6.1 rolls out with lots of fixes for KWin - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

Amazon ditch publishing duties on ex-Forza Horizon devs' story-driven open-world racer - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

“Sapkowski is a kleptomaniac with mythology” - How Reigns: The Witcher coaxes out the improv chaos of Geralt's universe - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

State Of The Union
February 24, 2026
Washington, DC