Linux Action News 146

Microsoft: Linux Defender antivirus now in public preview — We're aiming to protect the modern workplace environment across everything that it is, being Microsoft or non-Microsoft.

Firefox releases an Android app for its VPN service — The Firefox Private Network VPN is powered by Mullvad VPN. Mullvad VPN claims that it won’t log and monitor user data, unlike many other VPN services.

The Private Internet Access Android app is being open sourced

IVPN applications are now open source

Tom Scott video about VPNs

Android 11 Developer Preview — All the changes we found from Android 10 so far.

npm struggling to fund FOSS devs — Funding free software is 'still a very unsolved problem' says co-founder

The Linux Foundation and Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science Release Census for Open Source Software Security — New analysis identifies most widely used software and uncovers critical questions for the future of securing one of the world’s greatest shared resources

The Linux Foundation identifies most important open-source software components and their problems — In its latest study, the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative discovered just how prevalent open-source components are in all software and their shared problems and vulnerabilities.

Most-used libraries revealed

The Linux Foundation and Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science release census for open-source software security — Census II (run by Harvard) wanted to look at language-level packages. Their report discusses some of the challenges. One challenge of many is that the JavaScript environment strongly encourages tiny modules, with around 1/2 of all JavaScript packages having at most one function. As a result, when you start counting dependencies, there are far more dependencies in JavaScript (because each module does so little), and so JavaScript tends to dominate.