CGroups are under constant development, partly because they form the core of many commercial services these days. An amazing thing about this is that they remain an unfinished project. Isolating and apportioning system elements is an ongoing effort, with many pieces still to do. And because of security concerns, it never may be possible to present a virtual system as a fully independent system. There always may be compromises that have to be made.

Joel Fernandes submitted a module to export kernel headers through the /proc directory to make it easier for users to extend the kernel without necessarily having the source tree available. He said:

Columnist Dave Taylor reminisces about the early days of UNIX and how Linux evolved and grew from that seed. Twenty five years of Linux Journal. This also marks my 161st column with the magazine too, which means I've been a part of this publication for almost 14 years. Where does the time go?

There's an old saying, "anything worth doing, is worth automating"—or something like that. Downloading and reading Linux Journal always has been worth doing, and now you can automate it with our autolj script, which you can get here (updated to version 2.0, see the end of this article for a list of feature enhancements).

Ever since the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Panopticlick initiative in 2010, I’ve been sensitized to the risks and potential harms that come from adtech’s tracking of consumers. Indeed, in the years since, it has gotten far far worse. People are only now discovering the bad stuff that has been going on.

Kernel development is truly impossible to keep track of. The main mailing list alone is vast beyond belief. Then there are all the side lists and IRC channels, not to mention all the corporate mailing lists dedicated to kernel development that never see the light of day. In some ways, kernel development has become fundamentally mysterious.

Matthew Wilcox recently realized there might be a value in depending on C extensions provided by the Plan 9 variant of the C programming language. All it would require is using the -fplan9-extensions command-line argument when compiling the kernel. As Matthew pointed out, Plan 9 extensions have been supported in GCC as of version 4.6, which is the minimum version supported by the kernel. So theoretically, there would be no conflict.

Bugs happen. Every minute of every hour of every day, software bugs are hard at work, biting computer users in the proverbial posterior. Many of them go unnoticed (the bugs, not the posteriors). More still rise to the illustrious level of "bugs that are minor annoyances". Yet sometimes, when the stars align just so, a bug manifests itself in a truly glorious way. And when I say "glorious", I mean "utterly destructive and soul-obliterating". Nowhere are these bugs more insidious than when they are within the operating systems (and key components) themselves.

Decimals to Roman numerals—here we hit all the limitations of Bash shell scripting.

Good question. That's what people say when they don't have an answer yet. And such is the case with the question in the headline. I started wondering about it following  a tweeted response by Raouf Eldeeb (@raouf777) to Privacy is Personal: It is also a fundamental right, not a privilege to be bestowed on anyone. The individual should have the right to determine the extent of his privacy.