Vivaldi's New Qwant Privacy-Focused Search Engine, Microsoft Makes PowerShell Core a Snap, Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.6 Now Available, Apache Software Foundation's Annual Report and More

News briefs for July 20, 2018.

Vivaldi Technologies has added a new privacy-focused search engine called Qwant to its Vivaldi web browser. Qwant doesn't store cookies or search history. Softpedia News quotes CEO and co-founder of Vivaldi Jon von Tetzchner: "We believe that the Internet can do better. We do not believe in tracking our users or in data profiling." You need version 1.15 of Vivaldi in order to enable Qwant.

Microsoft has made its PowerShell Core available in the Snap Store as a Snap application, OMG Ubuntu reports, allowing "Linux users and admins on various distros to run the latest version of PowerShell securely and safely across desktop, laptop and IoT."

Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.6 is now available. According to the press release, this new version "adds new content for automating across hybrid and multicloud environments, along with simplified connections to network APIs and updates for Ansible deployments overseeing Windows environments". It allows users "to more rapidly expand their infrastructure, without expanding manpower" and focuses on three areas of automation: multicloud, network and Windows.

Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook announced the Open-Source Data Transfer Project to promote universal data portability. Phoronix reports that the initiative "is to enable consumers to transfer data directly from one server to another, without the need for downloading/uploading of the content". See also the Google Open Source blog for more information.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) released its annual report last week, which announced that the Foundation received open-source code worth more than $600 million by volunteer project contributors over a 12-month period. According to the post on IT Web, the report also covered one of the biggest crises for the ASF: "the Equifax data breach that affected 143 million consumers in the US and Canada as a result of a vulnerability in Apache Struts".

Jill Franklin is an editorial professional with more than 17 years experience in technical and scientific publishing, both print and digital. As Executive Editor of Linux Journal, she wrangles writers, develops content, manages projects, meets deadlines and makes sentences sparkle. She also was Managing Editor for TUX and Embedded Linux Journal, and the book Linux in the Workplace. Before entering the Linux and open-source realm, she was Managing Editor of several scientific and scholarly journals, including Veterinary Pathology, The Journal of Mammalogy, Toxicologic Pathology and The Journal of Scientific Exploration. In a previous life, she taught English literature and composition, managed a bookstore and tended bar. When she’s not bugging writers about deadlines or editing copy, she throws pots, gardens and reads. You can contact Jill via e-mail, ljeditor@linuxjournal.com.

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