Plus the good, the bad, and the impressive in the new Linux 5.13 release.

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• System76 Blog — Pop!_OS 21.04: A Release of COSMIC Proportions — Pop!_OS COSMIC (Computer Operating System Main Interface Components) gives you the freedom to navigate your workflow via your mouse, keyboard, and/or trackpad.
• Pop OS 21.04 Cosmic Desktop Brings Much Needed Productivity Boost
• Pop!_OS 21.04 Released with New ‘Cosmic’ Desktop
• Audacity Is Now A Possible Spyware, Remove It ASAP — The updated privacy policy page for Audacity includes a wide range of data collection mechanisms. It states for example that it can hand any user data to state regulators where it is located, which is basically Russia, USA and the EEA zone.
• Audacity GitHub: Clarification of Privacy Policy
• Audacity GitHub: New privacy policy is completely unacceptable!
• Audacity Desktop Privacy Notice
• GitHub - cookiengineer/audacity: Audacity Fork without any Sentry Telemetry or Crash Reporting.
• HN Audacity Discussion
• Fedora Audacity discussion
• Google is moving away from APKs on the Play Store — Starting in August, Google will require that new Play apps will have to be published using the Android App Bundle format. Your phone will still download apps as APKs, but the app bundles will create APKs that are optimized for your device.
• Linus Torvalds launches Linux kernel 5.13 after seven release candidates — “In fact," he said, "it’s one of the bigger 5.x releases, with over 16k commits (over 17k if you count merges), from over 2k developers.
• Some 5.13 development statistics [LWN.net]
• Linux Git: Merge tag ‘landlock_v34’
• (2016) Sandboxing with the Landlock security module [LWN.net]
• NFS is broken in Linux 5.13 — This made it into 5.13 final, and completely breaks NFSD for me. Existing mounts on clients hang, as do new mounts from new clients.
• Ubuntu 20.10 End of Life Warning — Official support for Ubuntu 20.10 ends on July 22, 2021.

Plus Pwned Passwords goes open source, the public release of Fuchsia, and Valve's rumored Linux handheld.

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• After staff revolt, Freenode management takes over hundreds of IRC channels for ‘policy violations’ — All told, it appears something like 700 Freenode channels have been seized and re-permissioned, supposedly because the channels mentioned Libera Chat in violation of Freenode's advertising policy.
• Freenode IRC staff resign en masse after takeover by Korea’s “crown prince”
• IRC Announcement - Fedora Magazine
• Ubuntu, Wikimedia jump ship to the Libera Chat IRC network after Freenode channel confiscations
• One week of Libera Chat — It’s been an exciting first week, and we’d like to say a massive thank you for your support, enthusiasm, and patience as we continue to work to bring Libera.Chat up to full capacity. In these first few days, we’ve been able to reach 16,500 simultaneous connections and 20,000 registered accounts.
• kline󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 on mastodon: “andrew lee just seized over 700 channels on freenode”
• PSA: Ubuntu’s IRC Channels Have Moved from Freenode to Libera Chat
• Gentoo Freenode channels have been hijacked — Today (2021-05-26) a large number of Gentoo channels have been hijacked by Freenode staff, including channels that were not yet migrated to Libera.chat. We cannot perceive this otherwise than as an open act of hostility and we have effectively left Freenode.
• Pwned Passwords, Open Source in the .NET Foundation and Working with the FBI
• Pwned Passwords is now open source!
• Troy Hunt on Twitter RE: the news
• The FBI will feed compromised passwords to Have I Been Pwned — As Hunt explained, the FBI is involved into all sorts of investigations into digital crimes, such as botnets, ransomware, online child sexual exploitation and terrorism. The compromised passwords they find are often being used by crime rings, so the passwords' quick addition to the HIBP database would be extremely helpful. That said, the website doesn't have a way for the feds to quickly feed passwords into its database yet.
• Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub — Google’s long-in-development, from-scratch operating system, Fuchsia, is now running on real Made by Google devices, namely, the first-generation Nest Hub.
• Here’s an easier way to try Fuchsia OS on your computer
• Linux Action Show 431
• Valve is making a Switch-like portable gaming PC — On Tuesday, SteamDB operator Pavel Djundik spotted the change in Steam's code, which pointed to a new device named "SteamPal".
• New Audacity Owners Want a CLA — For those not yet aware, we are introducing a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which contributors to Audacity will need to sign in order to contribute code to the project.
• Information About Our New Contributor License Agreement
• Nextcloud iOS app Open Sourced
• GitHub: nextcloud/ios/COPYING.iOS
• Nextcloud iOS app License Guidelines
• List of Open-Source iOS Apps
• Jami on the Mac App Store
• mediaU on the App Store
• Linux Game Development at Tesla? — Some of you might have heard, our dear technoking is bullish on games and making an awesome platform for all gamers in Tesla vehicles. The latest Model S on our website can give you a hint of what we're aiming for in terms of platform capability (sorry, can't divulge much more for now). The Tesla infotainment OS and platform software are based on a standard Linux, so of course, we're interested in helping the gaming community make Linux gaming excellent.

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• Linux 5.10 LTS Will Be Maintained Through End Of Year 2026 — Linux 5.10 as the latest Long Term Support release when announced was only going to be maintained until the end of 2022 but following enough companies stepping up to help with testing, Linux 5.10 LTS will now be maintained until the end of year 2026.
• Visual Studio Code April 2021
• Native wayland support with newest electron — Use `--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland`.
• VMware Prepares Linux Driver For Next-Gen Virtual GPU — With SVGA v3 also comes the ability to enjoy 3D guest acceleration on 64-bit ARM.
• Audacity ‘scared and excited’ to be bought and brought under Muse Group’s roof, promises to stay free and open source — Veteran audio editor Audacity has been purchased by Muse Group, although its new management has pledged to keep the platform free and open source.
• ‘A massive middle finger’: Open-source audio fans up in arms after Audacity opts to add telemetry capture
• Audacity Telemetry and Why Free Software Means Better Privacy – Purism — The ultimate reason that free software means better privacy is the fact that users can remove any code that violates their privacy and use the rest.
• The Audacity Pull Request
• Policies/Telemetry Policy - KDE Community Wiki
• [pdf] IEEE Statement — One of the PC members briefly mentioned a possible ethical concern in their review, but that comment was not significantly discussed any further at the time; we acknowledge that we missed it.
• LKML: Kees Cook: Report on University of Minnesota Breach-of-Trust Incident — This report summarizes the events that led to this point, reviews the "Hypocrite Commits" paper that had been submitted for publication, and reviews all known prior kernel commits from UMN paper authors that had been accepted into our source repository. It concludes with a few suggestions about how the community, with UMN included, can move forward.