News briefs for May 4, 2018.

Star Wars: Jedi Challenges is getting a free update called "Lightsaber Versus Mode", which adds local multiplayer to the previously single-player game, The Verge reports. The update is available on the Google Play store, but it also requires two of the Lenovo Mirage AR systems, two headsets, two lightsaber controllers and two light-up tracking beacons set to different colors. For this game, you can't "just hack away at your opponent; it procedurally generates a battle, using familiar elements from the single-player dueling mode".

The Arch Linux 2018.05.01 snapshot was released this week. This is the first to include the Linux 4.16 kernel, with mitigations for Meltdown and Spectre, updates for several drivers, improved KVM support and more. Note that this snapshot is only for new deployments. (Source: Softpedia News.)

Google today announced the release of version 0.1 of the open-source Kubeflow tool, which is "designed to bring machine learning to Kubernetes containers". According to TechCrunch, "the idea behind the project is to enable data scientists to take advantage of running machine learning jobs on Kubernetes clusters. Kubeflow lets machine learning teams take existing jobs and simply attach them to a cluster without a lot of adapting."

Google also has open-sourced gVisor, a new way to sandbox containers to "provide a secure isolation boundary between the host operating system and the application running within the container", ZDNet reports. gVisor's core is "is a kernel that runs as a normal, unprivileged process that supports most Linux system calls. This kernel, like LXD, is written in Go, which was chosen for its memory- and type-safety".

According to The Register, "researchers have unearthed a fresh new set of ways attackers could potentially exploit data-leaking Spectre CPU vulnerabilities in Intel chips". Currently, there is only information on Intel's plans for patches, but there is evidence that some ARM CPUs also are vulnerable.