• Linux Console + Boutique Distros | Choose Linux 29

  A confusing experience in Distrohoppers which raises deeper questions about the value and viability of smaller distros.

• iocage in Jail | BSD Now 338

  Distrowatch reviews FuryBSD, LLDB on i386 for NetBSD, wpa_supplicant as lower-class citizen, KDE on FreeBSD updates, Travel Grant for BSDCan open, ZFS dataset for testing iocage within a jail, and more.

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 845

  service now woes, raspberry pi 4, power strips, and more

It is now possible[1] to perform chosen-prefix attacks against the SHA-1 hash algorithm for less than USD$50K. For this reason, we will be disabling the "ssh-rsa" public key signature algorithm that depends on SHA-1 by default in a near-future release.

This algorithm is unfortunately still used widely despite the existence of better alternatives, being the only remaining public key signature algorithm specified by the original SSH RFCs.

Also: DragonFlyBSD Improves Its TMPFS Implementation For Better Throughput Performance

Sixth months after the start of the release engineering process for 9.0, the second (and most likely final) release candidate is now available.

Shortly after the first release candidate had been published and feedback came it, it became clear that this was not going to be the final state of 9.0. In the end a lot of fixes were done, but we used the opportunity to also incorporate more hardware support (Pinebook Pro) and update a few components (dhcpcd, openssl).

We will be very restrictive with further changes and expect a quick and smooth release from this point on. Tentative release date is February 14, 2020.

Since the start of the release process a lot of improvements went into the branch - nearly 700 pullups were processed!

This includes usbnet (a common framework for usb ethernet drivers), aarch64 stability enhancements and lots of new hardware support, installer/sysinst fixes and changes to the NVMM (hardware virtualization) interface.

We hope this will lead to the best NetBSD release ever (only to be topped by NetBSD 10 - hopefully later this year).

Also: NetBSD 9.0 Coming Soon With 64-bit ARM, Updated ZFS, Hardware-Accelerated Virtualization

• HardenedBSD Tor Onion Service v3 Nodes

  I've been working today on deploying Tor Onion Service v3 nodes across our build infrastructure. I'm happy to announce that the public portion of this is now completed. Below you will find various onion service hostnames and their match to our infrastructure.

• The MWL 2020 Asia Tour

  Why do this trip, when I loathe travel? Over the last twenty years, I’ve promised several folks that I would one day attend AsiaBSDCon. I keep my promises. I’m looking forward to being there, but not to getting there. The Bangalore trip is serendipitous. Presenting technology is how I built my career. Bangalore is a technology center and obviously a place I should present in. HasGeek asked if I would be interested, I said “if you could put an event by AsiaBSDCon,” and those folks actually went and did it. I’m simultaneously amazed and honored that they’ve gone to such trouble.