KDE is 20, Flash Lives, Deep Web Distros
It was twenty years ago in 1996 that KDE was first announced. The project is celebrating with a new book. Elsewhere, Abode announced they've updated the old Netscape Flash plugin and said that development would continue. JP Buntinx recommended some distributions for the "darknet" and a new Linux usermode rootkit was described by anti-virus company Trend Micro.
KDE will turn 20 on October 14 and the project is celebrating with a new timeline and book. KDE began in 1996 when Matthias Ettrich announced KDE as an Open Source alternative to CDE and Beta 1 was release a year later. In 1998 KDE 1 was released. The timeline said that it was in 2000 while KDE 2 was still in beta that the name went from the K Desktop Environment to KDE Desktop. The final was released later that same year. KDE 3 arrived in 2002 and remained the flagship version until 2008 when the controversial KDE 4 was released. In 2009 the project was split up into several sub-projects with independent release schedules and names. The project published their manifesto in 2012 containing guidelines and responsibilities for their members. Plasma (as the KDE desktop is now referred) 5 was released 2015 and KDE neon was created in 2016. The book is described as "37 stories about the technical, social, and cultural aspects that shaped the way the KDE community operates today." Jonathan Riddell asked when was your first KDE. My journey began in 2000 with version 1.99 (a developmental version of 2.0) that shipped with the initial boxes of Mandrake Linux 7.2. Happy Birthday KDE!
Several sites carried the news of a blog post from Adobe saying, "Today we are updating the beta channel with Linux NPAPI Flash Player by moving it forward and in sync with the modern release branch." The reason for the reversal was said to be to "improve security and provide additional mitigation to the Linux community." New version 23 binaries are available at Adobe Labs.
Trend Micro said they were sent a new rootkit sample by "a trusted partner" that targets Linux x86 and ARM systems. "The development of Umbreon began in early 2015, although its developer has been active in the cybercriminal underground since at least 2013." It infects userland space and uses core library hooks to access lower functions. It is said to be very difficult to detect. Senior Threat Researcher Fernando Mercês explained in detail how it works and how to remove it in his post at the Trend Labs blog.
And speaking of the "darkweb," The Merkle posted several Linux suggestions for navigating it. Suggestions include Tails, Kali, and Whonix.