News briefs for April 4, 2018. Richard Stallman writes "A radical proposal to keep personal data safe" in The Guardian: "The surveillance imposed on us today is worse than in the Soviet Union. We need laws to stop this data being collected in the first place."

Mozilla announced Firefox Reality today, "Bringing the Immersive Web to Mixed Reality Headsets". Firefox Reality is the only open source browser for mixed reality and the first cross-platform browser for mixed reality. See The Mozilla Blog for more details.

News briefs for April 2, 2018. Linux 4.16 was released yesterday. Linus says "the take from final week of the 4.16 release looks a lot like rc7, in that about half of it is networking. If it wasn't for that, it would all be very small and calm."

News briefs for March 30, 2018. Happy 20th Anniversary to Mozilla! Mozilla is celebrating its 20th anniversary tomorrow by adding four new topics to the Mozilla Manifesto launched in 2007. To summarize, Mozilla is committed to an internet that "includes all the peoples of the earth", "promotes civil discourse, human dignity, and individual expression", "elevates critical thinking, reasoned argument, shared knowledge, and verifiable facts" and "catalyzes collaboration among diverse communities working together for the common good". You can see the full addendum here, and Mozilla invites you to share your support via Twitter.

News briefs for March 29, 2018. The Qubes security-oriented OS has released version 4.0. Major changes in this version include "fully virtualized VMs for enhanced security", "a powerful new VM volume manager that makes it easy to keep VMs on external drives", "more secure backups with scrypt for stronger key derivation and enforced encryption" and "rewritten command-line tools with new options. See the release notes for more information, and download Qubes here.

The US Court of Appeals has reversed a 2016 jury decision on Google's use of Oracle's Java APIs as fair use. The damages could amount to nearly $9 billion for Google. According to The Register, Corynne McSherry, legal director for the EFF, claims the reversal bodes ill for small software companies, saying "This entire case has been a travesty start to finish."

News briefs for March 27, 2018. Mozilla today announced a new Facebook Container add-on for Firefox that prevents Facebook from tracking you around the web: "Facebook Container works by isolating your Facebook identity into a separate container that makes it harder for Facebook to track your visits to other websites with third-party cookies." See also the Mozilla blog for more on the story.

News briefs for March 26, 2018. Linux Mint recently announced the new MintBox Mini 2. The new Mini is "just as small as the original MintBox Mini and the MintBox Mini Pro but with much better specifications, better performance and a few more features". The new Mini 2 has an Intel 8260 chipset, which provides WiFi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.2. You can upgrade the RAM to 16GB, and the device is easy to open. The front has two USB 3.0 ports, audio and micro jacks and a microSD slot, as well as two LEDs. The MintBox Mini 2 will be around the same price as the original MintBox Mini and is expected to be available worldwide in June 2018.

News briefs for March 23, 2018. The Vivaldi browser has teamed up with DuckDuck Go to offer a more private search experience. According to Jon von Tetzchner on the Vivaldi team blog, "With this update, Vivaldi becomes the first browser to enable a default Private Search, and allows you to set a default search engine exclusively for Private Window browsing. Unlike in other browsers, when you open a Private Window in Vivaldi, you will find DuckDuckGo enabled as your default search engine. When you search using DuckDuckGo, your search history is not tracked in any way."

News briefs for March 22, 2018. Mozilla is accepting applications for its 2018–2019 Internet Fellowships: "Mozilla Fellows are technologists, activists, and policy experts building a more humane digital world." Apply here. Applications are due April 20, 2018 at 5pm EDT.

News briefs for March 20, 2018. GStreamer, the cross-platform multimedia framework, announced a new major stable release yesterday. The new version 1.14.0 has lots of new features and bug fixes, including WebRTC support, "experimental support for the next-gen royalty-free AV1 video codec", Video4Linux encoding support and more. See the release notes for more info.

News briefs for March 21, 2018. Google announced several new security features for its Cloud Platform today, including the Google Security Command Center, VPC Service Controls and Cloud Armor. For more details, see the reports on GeekWire, Wired and TechCrunch.

News briefs for March 19, 2018. Tails 3.6.1 is out, and the release fixes many security holes in 3.6. Update now.

News briefs for March 16, 2018. Private Internet Access announced that it is open-sourcing its software: "We believe that the shift to open source is the right move for a privacy-focused business, and recognise that code transparency is key. We appreciate that our code may not be perfect, and we hope that the wider FOSS community will get involved, provide feedback, feature requests, bug fixes and generally help provide a greater service to the wider privacy movement." You can check out the repo on GitHub and find them at #privateinternetaccess on chat.freenode.net.

News briefs for March 15, 2018. Linus Torvalds bashes CTS Labs' AMD chip report, calling it "more like stock manipulation than a security advisory", ZDNet reports. He went on to criticize the security industry for making inflammatory reports: "security people need to understand that they look like clowns because of it. The whole security industry needs to just admit that they have a lot of sh*t going on, and they should use -- and encourage -- some critical thinking."

News briefs for March 14, 2018. The new Raspberry Pi 3B+ has arrived, just in time for Pi Day. New features include "a more powerful CPU, now running at 1.4 GHz on all its four cores. The ethernet port has also been updated to a Gigabit port, an oft requested feature, although due to pre-existing limitations it maxes out at about 350 megabits." See the specs and benchmarks are here, and you can get one for $35 via the Product page.

News briefs for March 13, 2018. Mozilla's Firefox 59 is available for download. See the wiki for more information on its new features, including the "option to stop websites from asking to send notifications or access your device's camera, microphone, and location".

News briefs for March 12, 2018. Eric Raymond has started a new project after ranting about the state of the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) market, as The Register reports. The Upside project is hosted on GitLab and "is currently defining requirements and developing a specification for a 'high quality UPS that can be built from off-the-shelf parts in any reasonably well-equipped makerspace or home electronics shop'." You can read Eric's original UPS rant here.

News briefs for March 9, 2018. Purism announced yesterday that it's collaborating with cryptography pioneer Werner Koch "to integrate hardware encryption into the company's Librem laptops and forthcoming Librem 5 phone. By manufacturing hardware with its own software and services, Purism will include cryptography by default pushing the industry forward with unprecedented protection for end-user devices."

News briefs for March 8, 2018. The Chrome 65 release has moved to the stable channel. This release includes 45 security fixes and stronger ad blocking. See the log for more details.