News briefs for June 20, 2018.

Facebook yesterday announced it is open-sourcing BOLT, its "binary optimization and layout tool that accelerates large-scale applications". According to the Facebook post, "BOLT optimizes placement of instructions in memory, thereby reducing CPU execution time by 2 percent to 15 percent. Unlike previous tools to address instruction starvation, BOLT works with applications built by any compiler, including GCC or Clang. Today, we are open-sourcing BOLT so that engineers everywhere can use it alongside complementary technologies like AutoFDO to achieve performance gains for their apps."

Google recently introduced VR180 Creator for Mac and Linux. This new tool makes it easy to create and edit high-quality VR videos. To learn more about VR180 Creator, visit here, and to download, go here.

The 2018 Open Source Job Report is now available from The Linux Foundation and Dice. Some key findings include: "Linux is back on top as the most in-demand open source skill category, making it required knowledge for most entry-level open source careers" and "Containers are rapidly growing in popularity and importance, with 57% of hiring managers seeking that expertise, up from only 27% last year."

openSUSE Tumbleweed has three new snapshots this week, adding a bunch of improvements for KDE users—most notably, the update to Plasma 5.13. In addition, the Linux kernel updated from 4.16.12 to 4.17.1 and fixed some btrfs and KVM issues. See the openSUSE blog post for a description of all the updates.

Keepsafe yesterday launched a privacy-focused mobile browser. According to the TechCrunch post, you can lock the browser with a PIN or use Touch ID, Face ID or Android Fingerprint. You also can block social, advertising and analytics trackers, but still allow caching and cookies, or you can open a private tab, which erases everything as soon as you close it. The browser is available for free on Android or iOS.