Linux Action News 246

Some highlights from Linus' recent fireside chat, Qt gets a new leader and a Linux botnet we should probably take seriously.

• Akamai Warns Of “Panchan” Linux Botnet — The botnet introduces a unique (and possibly novel) approach to lateral movement by harvesting of SSH keys. Instead of just using brute force or dictionary attacks on randomized IP addresses like most botnets do, the malware also reads the id_rsa and known_hosts files to harvest existing credentials and use them to move laterally across the network.
• Canonical Continues Working On Ubuntu’s Firefox Snap Performance — On the Ubuntu blog is a new post by Canonical's Oliver Smith about their latest efforts to improve the Firefox Snap performance and other outstanding issues with this sandboxed version of the Mozilla web browser.
• Lars Knoll Announces His Successor For Qt Chief Maintainer — The voting period for the new Chief Maintainer has ended yesterday. This means Volker Hilsheimer will be our new Chief Maintainer. Congratulations!
• New Chief Maintainer for the Qt Project
• Talisman: Debut of X — I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W.
• X Window System Turns 38 Years Old — It was on 19 June 1984 that Bob Scheifler announced the initial X window system release "X1" at MIT.
• X Windows System Design Principles, a lecture by James Gettys
• A Political History of X - Keith Packard (LCA 2020)
• Linus Torvalds: Rust For The Kernel Could Possibly Be Merged For Linux 5.20 — Torvalds commented that real soon they expect to have the Rust infrastructure merged within the kernel, possibly even for the next release -- meaning Linux 5.20.
• Open Source Summit North America 2022: Keynote: Linus Torvalds
• How are we improving Firefox Snap performance? Part 2