News briefs for Friday, May 17, 2019.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise to buy Supercomputer-maker Cray. Bloomberg reports that the deal is "valued at about $1.4 billion as the firm works to become more competitive in high-end computing", and "Cray investors will get $35 a share in cash".

ManagedKube launches k8sBot, "an app that provides a point-and-click user interface for Kubernetes in Slack", available on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace. From the press release: "Companies can now ensure that all their team members have access to Kubernetes information. ManagedKube's k8sBot provides an easy-to-use interface in Slack so users can retrieve pod status, get pod logs, and get real-time troubleshooting recommendations with just one click. DevOps teams can get more done with k8sBot by easily sharing Kubernetes information in Slack, where team discussions are already happening, and automating DevOps support by democratizing access to Kubernetes information." You can install ManagedKube's k8sBot from here.

Purism's Librem One Suite surpasses its Crowdfunding goal after two weeks, demonstrating the "demand for ethical alternatives to Big Tech as data privacy snafus continue to plague users on a weekly basis". The Librem One Suite includes "end-to-end encrypted chat, end-to-end encrypted mail, and end-to-end encrypted VPN, as well as an open public social network. More services, such as end-to-end encrypted cloud storage, payments, and phone service, will be built in the future and added to the bundle. All current and future services in Librem One have no ads, do not track users, do not look at, sell, or share anything people create or send, and are available on popular platforms like Android and iOS." See Founder and CEO Todd Weaver's blog post 5000 Happy Librem One Users!" for more details.

Cloudflare this morning announces its support of BinaryAST. From the press release: "BinaryAST is a new over-the-wire format for JavaScript proposed and actively developed by Mozilla that aims to speed up parsing while keeping the semantics of the original JavaScript intact." See also the Cloudflare blog post "Faster script loading with BinaryAST" and VentureBeat's "Cloudflare-supported BinaryAST promises dramatically faster JavaScript apps" for more information.

Researchers have discovered another Intel processor vulnerability called Zombieload. According to ZDNet, "The researchers have shown a Zombieload exploit that can look over your virtual shoulder to see the websites you're visiting in real-time. Their example showed someone spying on another someone using the privacy-protecting Tor Browser running inside a virtual machine (VM)." But there's some good news: "To defend yourself, your processor must be updated, your operating system must be patched, and for the most protection, Hyper-Threading disabled. When Meltdown and Spectre showed up, the Linux developers were left in the dark and scrambled to patch Linux. This time, they've been kept in the loop."