News briefs for May 7, 2018.

Red Hat announced today that Vorwerk, a 130-year-old company that makes appliances, carpets, cosmetics and more, is launching a new IoT environment based on Red Hat solutions. Cookidoo is a digital recipe ecosystem "containing an IoT environment with multicloud support to integrate more than 1.5 million of its IoT devices. Cookidoo can be accessed directly via Thermomix, an advanced, multifunctional kitchen appliance, using the Cook-Key accessory."

Unity 2018.2 beta is now available. With this release, the cross-platform game engine now has Vulkan support for both Windows and Linux. Other improvements include package manager updates, texture mipmap streaming, a real-world physical camera model and more. See the Unity Blog for more info. (Source: Phoronix.)

Google recently open-sourced Seurat, "a tool designed to reduce complexity in high-fidelity mobile VR scenes, improving performance considerably". In other words, "Seurat takes all of the possible viewpoints that a VR user may have given their limited range of movement and removes the area of the 3D environment that they'd never be able to see."

There's a new automation framework called Brigade, which is written in Python. According to the Networklore post, "You could describe it as the automation framework for Pythonistas. This might strike you as something wonderful, or it could trigger your spider-sense. Writing code? Isn't that just for programmers?"

Android P is finally addressing a privacy issue by restricting apps from monitoring your network activity (although this only affects apps that target Android P). xda reported yesterday that currently, "apps on Android can gain full access to the network activity on your device—even without asking for any sensitive permissions. These apps can't detect the content of your network calls, but they can sniff any outgoing or incoming connection via TCP/UDP to determine if you are connecting to a certain server."