Snap Not Contained, Shuttleworth Says Don't Talk Back

Ubuntu continued to dominate the headlines today with some reporting the new version being actually available and all the usual accompanying posts. One of the more interesting Ubuntu articles of the day came from Matthew Garrett who said that Snap applications could expose your private data. In other Ubuntu news, Mark Shuttleworth announced the new codename for the next release already. Elsewhere, Gentoo was hacked onto a car computer and Microsoft is hiring Linux developers.

One of the new features for Ubuntu 16.04 was Snap packages, which isolates applications from each other. Greater security is one advantage of this format according to Canonical, but Matthew Garrett today said not if you run X11. Garrett said, "X has no real concept of different levels of application trust. Any application can register to receive keystrokes from any other application. Any application can inject fake key events into the input stream." He's even provided a proof-of-concept application to demonstrate this. Snap is a security enhancement when using Mir (or Wayland) and Garrett said it'd be a "step forward" once Ubuntu is using Mir on the desktop. Until then "it's disingenuous to claim that it currently gives desktop users any real security."

But founder Mark Shuttleworth had more important fish to fry today. He announced the codename of the next release of Ubuntu, 16.10, due October. Shuttleworth announced the name saying, "Yakkety yakkety yakkety yakkety yakkety yakkety yakkety yakkety yak. Naturally."

Fred Lambert reported today on a hacker who was able to get Gentoo installed on their Tesla's computer. The hacker known as Hemera can now enjoy multimedia such as "The Terminator" on the 17 inch backup camera screen. She was quoted as saying, "All those USE flags, CFLAGS, and optimizations are going to add speed to my car. My 5 second 0-60 will be faster than your 5 second 0-60!"

The Register today reported that Microsoft is trying to recruit and steal employees from Linux firms. "Microsoft is specifically looking for those with knowledge of Linux, Ansible, Docker and Chef. One Reg reader working for a well-known Linux distro firm told us he’d been interviewed to fill a role in pre-sales in Redmond's new open-source practice."