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225K downloads/week? Those are rookie numbers, lets update Termux!

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This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 27 Jun 2024, Week 26

Community News

Mumla, Voice chat on Mumble servers, was updated to 3.6.11, adding more languages and polish. While Mumla started as a fork of the discontinued Plumble, it’s actually now in a “maintenance only” mode as the main developer can’t cater to the speed of development needed. If you can lend a hand, do join its code forge.

Nekogram X, The third-party Telegram android app, was updated to 9.5.8 after an 8 month hiatus.

Plexus, Android App Compatibility, was updated to 2.0.3. The app is now build reproducible so F-Droid hosts the developer signed package. If you’ve installed it in the past please uninstall and install the new one.

SimpleX Chat, e2e encrypted messenger without any user IDs, was updated to 5.8.1. Messaging changes touch upon message routing, servers and themes, you can read more about these in the new developer blogpost.

Termux, Terminal emulator with packages, was updated to stable 0.118.1 and beta 0.119.0-beta.1 (manually install or opt-in to Beta versions) after two years. We are glad to see new development around this very beloved app (if we go by the download graphs at least) 🤷.

Removed Apps

2 apps were removed

Just Craigslist was hit by a trademark violation, but the app was no longer developed anyway so it got Archived. (#487)

Syphon, A privacy centric Matrix client, hasn’t seen any new releases for 2 years or any commits for the last year while being affected by some high severity CVE issues. While the source repo is not archived, some users have asked for this from upstream to signal that it is no longer developed at least. Users are advised to jump ship to the other developed clients like FluffyChat, SchildiChat or the new Element X. (#3288)

Newly Added Apps

4 apps were newly added
  • Koofr Vault – Client-side, zero-knowledge encrypted storage application by Koofr
  • OpenUSOS – Unofficial USOS app, for students in Poland
  • PocketTRacker – Reliably track the scores of your straight pool games
  • KitX Mobile – KitX Project’s mobile implementation, based on Flutter

Updated Apps

137 more apps were updated

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Windows 10 will be covered by 0patch, a third-party paid patching service

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So I learned something new today: there are companies that provide security patches for Windows that aren’t Microsoft. I never even considered this could be a thing, but it turns out that a paid service called 0patch seems to have been around for a long time, and the consensus seems to be that not only can it be trusted, it also sometimes provides patches sooner than Microsoft does. Today, 0patch announced it’ll also be providing this service for Windows 10 after the end of support next year. With October 2025, 0patch will “security-adopt” Windows 10 v22H2, and provide critical security patches for it for at least 5 more years – even longer if there’s demand on the market. We’re the only provider of unofficial security patches for Windows (“virtual patches” are not really patches), and we have done this many times before: after security-adopting Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 in January 2020, we took care of 6 versions of Windows 10 as their official support ended, security-adopted Windows 11 v21H2 to keep users who got stuck there secure, took care of Windows Server 2012 in October 2023 and adopted two popular Office versions – 2010 and 2013 – when they got abandoned by Microsoft. We’re still providing security patches for all of these. ↫ Mitja Kolsek on the 0patch blog This service implements patching through what it calls “micropatches”, which are very small sets of CPU instructions injected into running code in memory without modifying – in this case – Microsoft’s own code. These micropatches are applied by briefly stopping the offending program, injecting the fix, and continuing the program – without having to close the program or reboot. Of course, they can be unapplied in the same, non-disruptive way. The 0patch service will provide patches for 0days that Microsoft hasn’t fixed yet, patches for issues Microsoft won’t fix, and sometimes patches for third party code. As the headline clearly states, this service isn’t free, but honestly, at roughly 25 dollars plus tax per computer per year, it’s not exactly expensive, and definitely cheaper than Microsoft’s own Windows 10 Extended Security Update program it’s going to offer for Windows 10 after the end of support date next year. Diving a bit deeper into who is providing this service, it comes from a company called ACROS Security, a small company out of Slovenia. The company details its micropatches on its 0patch blog if you want more information on how each individual ones works. I still don’t know exactly what to make of this, and I definitely wouldn’t rely on something like this for mission-critical Windows computers or servers, but for something like a home PC that can’t be upgraded to Windows 11 but still works just fine, or perhaps some disposable virtual machines you’re using, this might be a good stopgap solution until you can upgrade to a better operating system, like Linux or one of the BSDs. Are there any people in the OSNews audience who’ve used 0patch, or perhaps a service similar to it?

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JRuby 9.3.15.0 Released

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The JRuby community is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 9.3.15.0

JRuby 9.3.x is compatible with Ruby 2.6.x and stays in sync with C Ruby. As always there is a mix of miscellaneous fixes so be sure to read the issue list below.

This release only fixes a single problem. “AOT” compiled ruby (using jrubyc) had an uncommon race condition which led to strange endless looping behavior.

2 Github Issues resolved for 9.3.15.0

OpenBGPD 8.5 released

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The OpenBGPD project announced that a new version the Border Gateway Protocol dameon, OpenBGPD 8.5 has been released. The release comes with a number of new features and refinements, and marks another step in the development of secure and reliable routing management.

The announcement reads: 

List:       openbsd-announce
Subject:    OpenBGPD 8.5 released
From:       Claudio Jeker <claudio () openbsd ! org>
Date:       2024-06-26 19:10:13

We have released OpenBGPD 8.5, which will be arriving in the
OpenBGPD directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon.

This release includes the following changes to the previous release:

Read more…