News briefs for August 10, 2018.

Ring-KDE 3.0.0, a GNU Ring.cx client, has been released. GNU Ring is a secure, distributed communication platform based on open industry-standard technologies for audio calls, video conferences, chat, screen-sharing and peer-to-peer file transfer. This new version of Ring-KDE is a full rewrite of the app "to use more modern technologies such as touch support, QtQuick2 and KDE Kirigami adaptive widget framework". When you join GNU Ring, "no servers or centralized accounts are needed. Beside an optional blockchain-based way to reserve your username against takeover, nothing leaves your device", and Ring-KDE "provides a simple wizard to help you create credentials or import your personal information from other devices." For more info, also visit here.

Intel debuts a totally silent ruler-shaped solid state drive, the Intel SSD DC P4500. This SSD is can store 32 terabytes—"equivalent to triple the entire printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress". In addition, "the no-moving-parts ruler-shaped SSDs can be lined up 32 side-by-side, to hold up to a petabyte in a single server slot. Compared with a traditional SSD, the 'ruler' requires half the airflow to keep cool. And compared with hard disk storage, the new 3D NAND SSD sips one-tenth the power and requires just one-twentieth the space."

Several security vulnerabilities were discovered recently in OpenEMR, developer of open-source electronic health records and practice management tools, possibly affecting the data of more than 90 million patients. Info Security Magazine reports that the issues "included nine separate SQL injection vulnerabilities, four remote code execution flaws and several arbitrary file read, write and delete bugs. Others included a portal authentication bypass, unauthenticated information disclosure, and cross-site request forgery". Info Security notes that OpenEMR team has since patched "most" of the vulnerabilities.

PostgreSQL announces a slew of new releases: 10.5, 9.6.10, 9.5.14, 9.4.19, 9.3.24 and 11 beta 3. The third beta release of PostgreSQL 11 "contains previews of all features that will be available in the final release of PostgreSQL 11". Two security issues and more than 40 bugs are also fixed in these updates.

Unigine, the Linux-friendly commercial game and professional graphics engine has released version 2.7.2. According to Phoronix, this release "has better importing support for CAD models, optimized texture streaming, physically-based cameras and lights, an improved particle system, multi-channel rendering improvements, and various other optimizations and polishing. Unfortunately, no word on Vulkan support yet for Unigine 2." For more info, see also the Unigine Dev site.